


chs

by starsidespica



Series: metempsychosis [3]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ar nosurge Fusion, Coming of Age, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mild Language, mild homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:14:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 70,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27041815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsidespica/pseuds/starsidespica
Summary: After losing Prim, Shinya thought he was okay with change and with loss.Turns out that wasn't true. There were bigger things for him to lose, like his best and only friend. Falling in love wasn't what Shinya planned to do, but here he was: in love, and wishing to any god that would listen to make it stop.Shinya wasn't ready for change. Not yet. Not ever. But the world turned whether he wanted it to or not, and once change struck all he could do was deal with the aftermath.A direct continuation of xest.
Relationships: Oda Shinya & Iwai Kaoru
Series: metempsychosis [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1441789
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	1. The Confession, Part One

**Author's Note:**

> chs: Hymmnos; verb. To become, or change into; usually only used when one wishes to change completely.

There was a freckle on Kaoru’s back.

Shinya couldn’t help but stare at it, that one damn spot demanding his attention, an island in a sea of milk. Even after Kaoru turned into his bedroom, soiled shirt in hand, Shinya kept seeing it. It made his mouth water more than the stew on the stove, and he thought—stupidly, briefly—of what it might taste like if he dragged his tongue over it. Surely not like caramel, like it looked.

The he groaned and banged his head against the table.

No way. It was—it was _Kaoru_ , for crying out loud! Kaoru! How many times had they been left alone like this, doing whatever the hell they wanted? How many times had Shinya seen him without one of his ridiculous polos on? How many times—and _now_ was the one time his thoughts turned out like that?

Shinya blamed the news bulletin on the train. So some celebrity was gay, big deal, who cared?

(Shinya, apparently. Shinya apparently cared a lot.)

“Keep scowling at the rice like that and it’ll go bad, Shinya,” Kaoru said, tapping his shoulder as he moved behind him to get back to the stove, the sleeves of his new shirt straining over his arms.

Shinya tore his eyes away from the muscles bunching in his best friend’s arms, and went back to glaring at the rice. “It’ll be fine,” he said, voice shaking. Damn it all. “Are—are you okay? That looked like it hurt.”

“I’ve gotten worse. It’s fine.”

Shinya nodded. He turned from the rice to the cabinets, setting the table to give his hands something to do, but every time he closed his eyes that freckle came back. Kaoru would taste like sweat and salt, and maybe a bit like soap. Shinya would be able to feel him trembling under his tongue—what kind of noises would he make—

“Bathroom,” Shinya called, strangled, and barely gave Kaoru time to acknowledge it before he rushed off. The bathroom was quiet, at least, almost peaceful, cut off from the sizzle of the stove and the clangs as Kaoru stirred the pot.

Shinya’s face in the mirror was anything but peaceful. He was as red as the tomatoes he’d diced; he was also shaking, strangely aware of the urge to go back out to the kitchen and lick that damn freckle, Kaoru and his shirt be damned. The stew be damned, too. Who needed to eat when there was something so tasty right in front of him—

He slammed his head into the counter. It was Kaoru. It was _Kaoru_ , god _damn_ it! Where was this coming from? And why now, when everything in his life was going mildly well? Why now, when he was finally almost happy again?

Why now? Why, at all?

Shinya Oda, at fifteen years old, was very sure something was wrong with him.

* * *

There weren’t many people he could ask. His mom was out of the question—she’d freak out and would probably lock him in his room for a month, only letting him out for supervised bathroom breaks and meals. Mr. Iwai, Kaoru’s dad, was definitely out of the question—if he didn’t go straight to Kaoru with it, he’d probably ban Shinya from seeing him for the rest of their lives.

But… there was someone…

Shinya grimaced. His feet had taken him to the faculty office, to Mr. Mori, without him even having to think about it. He was a third-year. He should have his shit together without having to rely on a teacher for everything.

There was a spot on the door. Just a speck of paint dried a bit funny so that it cast a shadow, but it made Shinya think of Kaoru’s back. That dumb fucking freckle and the smooth shift of muscle as Kaoru slid his shirt over his head, hissing. Slamming his head into the counter at Kaoru’s hadn’t helped one bit; slamming his head into the door wasn’t likely to work, either.

God, what he’d give for a taste—

The door slid open. Hanaomi—he thought that was her name, but he could have been wrong—turned from saying goodbye to one of the teachers and jumped at him standing there. All thoughts of Kaoru vanished.

“What?” Shinya asked.

“Nothing!” she said, edging around him before rushing down the hall.

“Oh, Oda,” Mr. Mori said, glancing over to see what the fuss was about. “I’d thought you’d gone home for the day.”

“Not today,” Shinya told him. The other teachers glared as he went in—Mr. Mori was the only one ever happy to see him, and Shinya wasn’t dumb enough to think it wasn’t partially his own fault anymore—and Shinya glared right back until they went back to grading or planning or making phone calls. He stopped in front of Mr. Mori’s desk: math workbooks in a stack in one corner, post-it notes feathered up the sides; the most recent tests and the answer sheet, propped up in front of the computer; a sudoku puzzle from the newspaper half-filled out in pencil. Shinya snagged it, glancing at the numbers. Three of them were wrong. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Maybe it was just his imagination, but the rest of the room went quiet really fucking fast. Jerks.

Mr. Mori tapped his pen on the desk, twice. _Privately?_ he was asking, even as he said, “Well, you’re here. Talk away.”

“It’s, uh,” he said, aware of how Mrs. Iguchi was leaning over in her seat, and how Ms. Urihara kept sneaking glances at him. If the whole school didn’t already know his mom was a serious piece of work, the _teachers_ certainly did, and if they caught wind of this…

He’d never live it down. Fat old Mr. Tomita would shout it from the rooftops: Shinya Oda, with his girly long hair, was—

No, no. There was every chance it was just a passing thing. It was _Kaoru_ , for fuck’s sake.

He set the newspaper back down, tapping it twice. _Yes, privately,_ as he said, “You got these ones wrong.”

“Did I? You’ve really got an eye for these things, don’t you, Oda?”

Shinya shrugged. “I guess so.”

They were just numbers. They made more sense than people.

They made more sense than… this, whatever it was. This weird thing with Kaoru. He really hoped Mr. Mori would have an idea as to what was going on, because if he didn’t, Shinya was out of options. He’d have to turn to the internet, and nobody there was going to be honest. They’d joke and call them names, and Kaoru deserved better.

Mr. Mori erased the ones he pointed out, then sat back in his chair. He rubbed at his eyes—Shinya had never been able to figure out if it was faked or not, since half of his teachers had bags under their eyes—and said, “I could use a drink right about now. How about you, Oda?”

Shinya was starving. The meager bento box he’d packed himself wasn’t nearly enough to get him home without a snack first anymore, and that bothered him, too. The more he ate, the bigger a burden he would be on Kaoru and his mom.

“I guess,” Shinya said, wondering how much change he had left in his pocket.

“Why don’t we go together, then? Two birds with one stone.”

How many people would they walk by on the way to the vending machines? How many people would spy on them just to hear the whole conversation?

It was better than staying in here, though, with these nosy-ass teachers.

“Sure,” Shinya said.

He waited out in the hall as Mr. Mori gathered up his coat and wallet. Even in the middle of December, it was getting cold enough to make him think it would snow any day now; the school itself had this perpetual chill to it, one that wormed its way into Shinya’s bones through his layers. His own coat was a size too small, and his wrists jutted out of his sleeves.

(Kaoru had clicked his tongue, seeing that. Shinya had shoved his hands in his pockets and dared him to say anything. He hadn’t.)

The only thing he had enough change for was a can of ice-cold Second Maid. He didn’t bother, taking the other half of the snack Mr. Mori had bought and nibbling at it as the man got his cup of cocoa. They hid in the corner, Mr. Mori in his big coat and steaming cup blocking Shinya’s view of the stairs—and the other way around.

Shinya didn’t give a damn. Not right now.

And, actually, now that he was here he was starting to think this was a bad idea—Mr. Mori would judge him just the same as everyone else, and then Shinya wouldn’t have anyone to rely on, at all—but he couldn’t just sit on it forever. What if this ruined their friendship? What if Shinya wound up doing something weird and drove Kaoru away?

He didn’t want that.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”

But he hated to beat around the bush, too. Mr. Mori understood; he liked numbers, too, and numbers didn’t have angles to them, facets through which their meanings changed and shifted until they were completely different. Numbers were numbers, and they always would be.

… But he couldn’t think of a good way to explain it.

“Um,” he said, eloquent as usual. “Well—something happened at my friend’s house the other day, and I—um, I wanted to understand it better, I guess.”

“What happened?”

Shinya laid it out: how they’d been cooking together after school; how Kaoru had gone to taste the stew but Shinya had jostled his arm, knocking the whole ladle full of broth onto his shirt; how he’d whipped it off right there, in the kitchen. The freckle—the fucking, _goddamn_ freckle—and the really goddamn weird way it made Shinya feel.

“We’ve gone swimming before,” Shinya told him. “We’ve changed in front of each other. I’ve seen his back before. Why’s it gotta be different now? I don’t get it.”

Mr. Mori wasn’t looking at him like he was an insect on the bottom of his shoe, though, which was something. But he didn’t say a word; maybe he was thinking.

“I know boys can like other boys, and girls can like girls,” Shinya said. He’d taken health class, the same as everyone else, though his mom had thrown a fit about it. She’d wanted to opt him out, and the school had put its foot down.

Good thing, too—Shinya had gotten to be just as embarrassed as everyone else for once, and over the same thing.

“Things change,” Mr. Mori said. “I married my best friend too, actually. We grew up together. I remember thinking that she was the same as ever until one day in high school when I realized she was a—a _girl_. Actually a girl, and not the tomboy I recalled. Is that what you’re worried about?”

“I don’t want things to change,” Shinya said. It was Kaoru, and Kaoru deserved better. Kaoru deserved the whole damn world on a silver platter. “I don’t want to think about—about what I thought about, before, whenever we’re together.”

Mr. Mori sipped at his cocoa. He handed Shinya another snack, and Shinya ate it. Anything to stop talking. Anything.

But Mr. Mori asked, “What did you think about, before?”

The freckle. How it looked like it would be the sweetest thing in an ocean of cream, a sea of milk. Kaoru’s muscles, too, rippling like waves. Shinya stared at the floor and said, “What it would taste like. It’s dumb. I don’t like it.”

Maybe if he said, _Oh, that’s perfectly normal behavior between best friends_ , maybe it would have been different. If he said, _Oh, that’s how I knew I wanted to marry my best friend_ , maybe it would have been different, too. Instead, Mr. Mori said, “If it bothers you, maybe you should take some time apart. Your entrance exams are coming up soon, aren’t they? You can do some research while you’re studying.”

“Is that how you say you don’t want to tell me?”

“It’s how I say you should work through your feelings on your own,” Mr. Mori said. “There are a variety of ways to explain why you’re feeling this way, but whether you want to sleep with him or not is ultimately up to you.”

Shinya’s voice was too small as he protested, “I never said I wanted to do that.”

Mr. Mori fixed him with a look. Part of Shinya seethed at the pity; another part of him preened as Mr. Mori said, “That’s why I said to do some research. Compare your experiences to other people’s—more than mine, at the very least—and decide what you’ll do from there. You’re a smart boy; you’ll figure it out with enough clues. And rest assured that no matter what, I’ll still be here for you.”

“Because you’re a teacher. You have to be.”

“No, not that,” Mr. Mori said, sipping at his cup and frowning when he discovered it was empty. “Because times change, and people change, and if the rest of the world stays stuck in its ways, no one will ever be happy. The ones who need support will never receive it. And, let’s say I give a definitive, right now: if I told you how you’re feeling about your friend means that you’re gay, you may go another twenty or thirty years before realizing that’s not entirely true. Maybe you’re bi; maybe you only love your friend because he’s the only one you trust. It’s hard to say. The only thing I can tell you is that, no matter what, I won’t abandon you.”

That was a weird thing to say. Mr. Mori would only be his teacher for a few more months, and then Shinya would be gone, off to high school like so many of the rest of his classmates. But the thought was nice. Not being abandoned, not being left to rot because of something dumb like this.

And it was dumb. Life would be so much easier if Shinya hadn’t wanted to lick that goddamn freckle in the first place.

“You’re a bad teacher,” he said, instead of a million other things.

“I’ve been told I’m blunt to a fault,” was his defense. “And you _are_ fifteen. There’s no real need to keep beating around the bush; you aren’t exactly a child anymore, or you won’t be for much longer. Someone will need to be blunt with you.”

“You’re a bad teacher,” Shinya insisted, “but you’re a good friend, I think.”

“Indecencies aside?”

Mr. Mori didn’t know Kaoru was in his first year of college. He didn’t know Shinya had helped him study for his exams last year, and that was why Shinya was so far ahead of everyone else in half his subjects. Learning was a different kind of competition from Gun About, and Shinya had taken to browsing through the books in Kaoru’s room when he was late for their hangouts. He needed to hide some of them better.

“Yeah,” he said. “They might not like it, but you’re right: I won’t be a kid forever. Adulthood’s just around the corner, right?”

“And it’ll get here faster than you might think.”

Shinya nodded. Life was already a blur sometimes; he could see another five years vanishing before his eyes before he even thought about it.

It was… kind of scary, but kind of exciting, too.

How much would he change in another five years? In another five months? In another five days? How differently would he feel by then?

“Yeah,” he said, at a loss. His mom had changed a lot in five years, five months. She hadn’t always been this way.

That was what scared him: would he grow up to be just like his mom? Or would he be better, kinder, more open-hearted than her?

He didn’t know.

* * *

There wasn’t much for Shinya to do—there never was, aside from hang out with Kaoru or Mr. Iwai in his shop until he got kicked out—so he wound up doing just that: researching, treating his own feelings like a Gun About game he could win with enough tips. Except the prize was Kaoru and knowledge, not points on a scoreboard, and the research suggested that he think a lot.

So he did.

He couldn’t say he liked girls, with their long nails and their screechy voices and their short skirts. They got pissed off if someone happened to look under them, even though they were so short all it would take was a passing breeze. He didn’t like their make-up either, even if they tried to call it natural. They looked like they were wrapped in plastic. He didn’t get the point.

(And he didn’t get how some girls could wear their hair however they liked—long enough to touch their butts or short enough to look like a boy’s—and not get so much as a passing glance from fat old Mr. Tomita, who still liked to crow whenever Shinya got a haircut. His mom was getting a steadier hand with scissors, even if she did miss and clip his ears still. Shinya suspected he would never get rid of the scars.)

And he couldn’t say he liked boys, either. All the athletes at school were constant jerks; all the nerds were, too. If he heard so-and-so had a nice smile or was good at listening, he thought, _So what? Kaoru’s good at that, too._

Kaoru was good at a lot of things.

But he tried. Tried to see what was so great about Morita’s smile, tried to understand why Kagami’s ability to shut up and listen was so astounding… but found nothing.

 _So much for research_ , he thought, climbing the stairs to the vending machines. He had enough change for something hot today, and it had snowed the day before, a light dusting that turned to mush under tires and shoes. He wanted to warm up before braving the sidewalks in his ratty sneakers.

He huddled in the corner with his drink, still thinking. Kaoru was a boy, and Shinya clearly felt something for him, something deeper than just friendship. He couldn’t count the amount of times they’d hugged or held hands, and general consensus was that just wasn’t something guys who were just friends did.

It was bullshit. Girls could do that, but guys couldn’t?

Girls could do a lot of things, he was realizing.

“Oh, it’s Oda,” someone said, coming up the stairs. Okuma-something, probably; Shinya recognized his voice, although he styled his hair differently every day of the week. Today his bangs were feathered across his forehead. He grinned as he reached the vending machine.

“So what,” Shinya said, and sipped his drink.

“Off on your lonesome again?” Okuma asked, with a laugh, like it was funny.

“You’re alone too.”

“Yeah,” Okuma said, “right now, I am. But you always are. We’re third years. Don’t you have friends to hang out with?”

“I have friends,” Shinya spat. _Just not here_ , he didn’t add.

The machine clunked. Okuma had bought coffee, and the sharp crack of the tab as he opened it echoed. The machines up here were always deserted after school; everyone preferred the ones in the courtyard, where there was space to hang out in big groups, even in the cold.

 _Just go away_ , Shinya pleaded mentally. Okuma had friends waiting for him somewhere; obviously he needed to get back to them right away.

Instead he sat down in the corner opposite Shinya’s. “Shit, the floor’s cold,” he griped.

“Then don’t sit on it.”

“Don’t be such a jerk, Oda. I’m keeping you company.”

Company was the last thing Shinya wanted. That was why he’d come up here: to get away from all the people before he braved the trains to go home. He’d told Kaoru some bullshit about needing to study for his exams, and Kaoru had blinked like he’d forgotten they weren’t the same age. Figures.

Okuma could take the hint, at least: he didn’t chatter, like he usually did in the breaks between classes. Maybe without his friends nearby he wasn’t prone to. Fuck if Shinya knew—instead, he pulled out his phone and started fiddling with it, leaving his drink to cool on the floor. He sniffed.

Was—was Shinya supposed to ask, or…?

No, he wasn’t. It was cold. Noses ran. Okuma might look like he was frantically texting somebody and getting more and more upset by the second, but that wasn’t Shinya’s business. Really wasn’t his business. If somebody got in his face about his business, he’d hate it for sure.

But after five minutes, when his drink was gone and Okuma’s was cold, he managed out a deadpan, “What happened.”

“None of your business,” Okuma said, with another sniffle.

“Whatever, then.” He got up to throw his can away.

Okuma said, “My boyfriend’s breaking up with me.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know! He won’t tell me!”

Shinya sighed and sat back down. He’d spent nearly two weeks scouring the internet for love advice and staring at all of his classmates like a creep; how was he supposed to help? “If he won’t tell you, doesn’t that mean you can’t fix it?”

“What the hell do _you_ know? What if he hates me now? What if he just doesn’t like my hair?”

“Your hair’s fine.”

“Just because your mom cuts yours doesn’t mean you know anything about hair.”

Shinya glared at him. Okuma hid his face behind his phone screen, still sniffling.

God.

Okay, so Okuma had a boyfriend, and he’d been hiding it from the rest of his friends, probably—if his boyfriend wasn’t one of his friends, anyway—so he’d come up here to have some quiet while he—what? Tried to get back together? Tried to convince his boyfriend to tell him why they were breaking up in the first place?

“You don’t seem surprised,” Okuma said. “That I—”

“I am,” Shinya told him, because it was a bit too convenient. He’d been trying to find out what was so great about guys that girls would want to date one, and here a gay kid had come traipsing up the stairs. “I just don’t care.”

“You really are weird, Oda.”

“I can leave.”

“No!” Okuma said, sharply. “Please don’t. I want to ask him why but I don’t want to be alone when I hear it.”

“Sure, whatever,” Shinya said, and Okuma resumed typing. He kept stopping to reach up and wipe his nose, or his eyes, with the back of his hand. Shinya tried to be quiet, though he couldn’t help tapping the side of his can to the beat of a song he’d heard on his way to school that morning. The lyrics had been gibberish drowned out by the crowd, but he could remember the melody.

… No, actually. He had heard the song before. In the… game. The phone game. The one he’d lost, and been happy about it.

How did it go, again? Aimakan?

Shit, now he wanted to know. He wanted to know what Prim had been singing when she’d fought him. He wanted to know what she’d wished for, when she defied his control.

(He knew what she wished for. He just didn’t want her to hate him.)

Okuma sniffled, face red from wiping. The floor was cold, he’d said. Shinya thought of one of the worst nights of his life—one of dozens that year, it felt like—and how Kaoru had pressed in close, letting Shinya know he was there without saying a word, every single time.

Could he let Okuma wallow all by himself? He didn’t know the guy, not really. They were in the same class but that didn’t mean much.

He couldn’t. Okuma hadn’t a done a thing for him, but he hadn’t for Kaoru, either, back then; he huffed and got up. Okuma didn’t look up from his phone, not even when Shinya sat back down right next to him so they were crammed into the tiny space between the trash cans and the wall.

Okuma was warm, like Kaoru. People were warm—Shinya’s mom was warm, even though she seemed to suck up all the warmth in the room whenever she entered; Mr. Iwai was warm, too, his hands gentle when he handed some new model over for Shinya to look at. Okuma was warm, too, and he pressed back against Shinya as he kept typing.

Shinya ignored Okuma’s phone screen—even though he wanted to be nosy, wanted to look, wanted to know what was going on—and pulled his own out. Kaoru had found some message board back then. He had talked about it a lot, pulling up videos and screenshots and a user-made guide for getting through the game, and then he’d asked, “How come yours is so different?”

Because half those users were fujos, probably, and the other half wanted to feel cool beating up fairies with a brawny dude and a robot. Prim had been the lesser of three evils, and she never begged or pleaded with him the way that Ion guy had with his players. Shinya had shrugged, because why did it matter?

But it mattered, he was realizing. Shinya had been the bad guy. Shinya had been duped into nearly destroying the whole world and taking Prim and her parents with it. None of them had done anything wrong, and he still got the feeling that if he hadn’t been wavering right then, he would have won.

The thought tasted sour.

He would have won.

Most of the posts were a year old by now. The site itself was still active, although the admin had put up a stickied post—something along the lines of **He’s coming home, thanks for your help** —before vanishing like he always did.

What, was the guy some antisocial loser? And Shinya thought he was bad sometimes. Shit.

“Oh, I remember that,” Okuma said. “Did you get it too, Oda? That app thing.”

“Yeah.”

“Man, that thing was tough!” Okuma laughed. “It, like, read your mind and shit! I got kicked out of that genome thing for saying I liked the guy—what was his name?”

“Beats me.”

Shinya remembered, though. It was an easy enough name to remember: Ion. Prim had cried it, at the end. Prim had begged him to Sing.

“What?” Okuma was asking. “Don’t tell me you didn’t get very far, either.”

“I got all the way to the end,” Shinya told him, tucking his phone away. He’d look the song up later; maybe Kaoru remembered it. He liked that kind of thing. “Then I lost to the final boss. If I hadn’t—”

No. Shut up. Don’t tell Okuma about Prim. Prim was his and Kaoru’s and no one else’s. Prim was his failure; Prim was his salvation. Prim was the reason he could look at his mom like she really did care, still.

But Okuma, damn him, didn’t get it. “If you hadn’t—what?”

Shinya got up. He threw his can away and stormed down the stairs, hands deep in his pockets, one curled around his phone, ignoring Okuma’s cries of _What?_ and _Come on, man, you gotta tell me!_ as he followed along like a duckling, boyfriend forgotten.

But Prim was Shinya’s. Shinya’s mistake, Shinya’s biggest failure, Shinya’s biggest loss.

Because Prim was dead, and Shinya was why.

* * *

As Christmas gradually drew nearer—and their teachers talked their ears off about entrance exams this, entrance exams that—it became more and more apparent that the last thing Shinya should have done was sit next to Ryo Okuma and browse an old forum dedicated to a mobile game that didn’t exist anymore.

Okuma—Ryo, he kept insisting, but Shinya would have a heart attack and die if he called him that—bounced back pretty easily from getting dumped and found his new calling in pestering Shinya instead. He’d sit with him on their breaks. He’d invite him to sit with his group of friends at lunch. He’d hover over Shinya’s shoulder when he got his tests and homework back, which wasn’t hard, because Okuma sat right behind him.

And the closer Okuma wanted to get, the more Shinya pulled away.

It was—it was _weird_. Shinya had gone most of his school life without a single friend to his name. Some of his classmates called him teacher’s pet for hanging out with Mr. Mori after school when the Math Club wasn’t meeting—Shinya would shoot them a one-finger salute and be on his way. Nobody really enjoyed his company, especially after first year, and Shinya was content to go through his school days alone if it meant hanging out with Kaoru later.

But Okuma _didn’t get it_.

“It’s the last day of term, Oda,” Okuma said. He was blocking Shinya in—the other door was crammed full of his classmates giving each other tearful goodbyes, even though they’d see each other again in a week. “Just once! Please!”

Maybe he was hanging out with Kaoru too much, or maybe he’d been thinking of Prim too often again, but there was a desperate look in Okuma’s eyes. He was practically on the floor, he was bowing so low, and his usually carefully-styled hair hung limp. People were looking over; they were pointing and staring. Sakurazawa was pushing his way through the crowd, trying to get to them.

Shinya scowled, just so Okuma would have to know just how against this he was. Seriously—now his plans were shot. So much for Kaoru’s study group. “Fine, whatever,” he said.

Okuma beamed, dragged him out the door and down the hall by the arm, and before Shinya knew it they were on a train, going who-knows-where. He considered texting Kaoru something along the line of **I’ve been kidnapped** , but after the debacle with the yakuza two years ago Shinya wasn’t about to try it.

(It hurt more than he had realized, waiting and worrying. Not knowing whether Kaoru was okay or not. Not knowing if he was next. He could forgive his mom for lashing out about that; what he couldn’t forgive was her calling Kaoru a delinquent and tearing apart Shinya’s room for evidence.)

So instead he shot off a quick **Don’t think I’ll make it tonight** and ignored the subsequent buzzing, letting Okuma have hold of his sleeve and therefore the right to drag him out of a station, down a street, and into a familiar diner: the one right by Untouchable, where Kaoru and his dad ate sometimes.

Okuma snagged a booth in the back, dragging Shinya down with him; he buzzed for a waitress. Shinya, who was very aware of the price of everything on the menu, resigned himself to surprise sandwiches.

“My treat,” Okuma added, as if he’d forgotten. He likely had; he’d shoved both of their bags onto the other booth seat, Okuma’s distinguishable from his own only by the thin blue band on the strap. Some kind of charm, maybe.

“Great,” Shinya said. He’d never ordered the hamburger steak here, although Kaoru always said it was good—but it would never beat his mom’s. It just wouldn’t be the same, and he wasn’t sure if that was because of the flavor or her expression anymore. She’d always been happy, watching his face light up at the sight of it.

Now she was never happy.

“You could thank me, you know.”

“For dragging me out here? No thanks.”

Okuma looked like he was going to say something, but then a trio of kids—older kids, at least Kaoru’s age—stampeded by, one of them carrying a bulging bag with a power cord hanging out. The redhead and the blond were deep in a loud argument and passed their booth by without so much as a glance, talking about color schemes and holiday appeal and whether they were going to a gallery next weekend.

“It’s his first in ages!” the redhead shrieked. “We have to be there!”

“Says you; you couldn’t be bothered to show up for _my_ first meet—”

The door jingled shut behind them, where their argument was mercifully muffled by the wall.

Some frumpy kid—the guy with the bag, whose strap had twisted to catch a pair of rings on a necklace. “They could wait,” he muttered as he passed by.

They ordered. He and Okuma sat in heavy silence; the diner was busy for the last day of term, but no one seemed to notice Okuma pressed right into his side. The booth wasn’t tiny enough that they couldn’t have had some space between them, but Shinya had brought this on himself: he’d been the one to sit next to Okuma first. It was probably some kind of signal; shame Shinya didn’t know gay kid code as easily as he knew military hand sign.

(Which was… weird, probably. Only the army nerds would know military hand sign, right? Did that make him an army nerd?)

Even after their food arrived—Okuma’s curry plate, Shinya’s omelet with rice—Okuma’s whole damn side was just… there, pressed into his. Hot, almost stifling.

At least with Kaoru Shinya could pull away, no questions asked. Okuma probably had a dozen ready to fire off if Shinya had to so much as use the bathroom.

So stupid.

“Sorry,” Okuma said, halfway through his plate. “You’re not enjoying this, are you.”

“Was I supposed to be?”

“I don’t know—maybe. With a mom like yours, any second you spend away from her has to be a godsend, right?”

“I spend as much time as I can away from her,” Shinya said, glancing at the diner—kids swinging their feet as they told their parents a story, a worn-out businessman falling asleep in his seat; waiters and waitresses with trays in their arms. None of them watching, and the noise just loud enough that one simple conversation was lost in it. He added, “Don’t tell me you feel sorry for me. Is that what this is about? You feel sorry for me, and then you made up that bullshit about a boyfriend so I’d stay and talk with you?”

Okuma, all his previous cheer and bluster gone, said, “I didn’t make it up. He broke up with me. He wanted time to study for the exams. I don’t think he was serious about—about us.”

Obviously not.

“And how can I not feel sorry for you?” he went on. “You walk into class with those cuts on your ears. You’ve had them since first year. That’s not normal, Oda.”

Shinya stared at his plate. Thank fuck everyone else was keeping to themselves, but fuck if Shinya wanted this out in the world. Okuma wasn’t even acting like it was problem, talking about shit like parental abuse in some family diner with mediocre lighting and a few hundred-yen-store paintings on the wall.

Fuck.

“I know it’s not,” Shinya said, faintly aware of trips to the salon or the barber—whichever his mom had coupons for at the time—for haircuts until he wanted to grow it out. If he tried to go there now, not only would he not have the money for a proper cut, but his mom would be furious he let someone else do it, someone other than her.

There was something wrong with her, but he’d known that for years.

There was something wrong with him, too, but he wasn’t going to tell Okuma that.

He went back to his food, trying to ignore how bland everything tasted next to Kaoru’s cooking. It was just omelet rice, he told himself. His first try wasn’t much better.

But this was a restaurant. How could they stay in business serving bland food?

“Do they hurt?” Okuma asked.

“Sometimes,” Shinya answered. They were cuts. How could they not?

And why were they talking about him, anyway?

“She should care more,” Okuma muttered, stirring the rice on his plate and brushing hair out of his eyes. “Jiro should care more, too.”

“Your boyfriend?”

Okuma nodded. “Ex-boyfriend. It’s over. I didn’t think he was the type to break up with me over text, but I guess I was wrong.”

Half a dozen missed calls; over a dozen unread text messages, all of them saying the same thing: where are you? Where could you be if you’re not here, making me happy?

Shinya, who hadn’t asked for this—none of this, at all, _ever_ —said, “Yeah, guess so.”

Okuma huffed a laugh. “You’re pretty bad at cheering people up, you know that?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Was that what he wanted? To be cheered up? If he wanted that, he should have gone and told his friends; they’d be more than happy to slander his ex with him, and they’d do it happily. Shinya, though…

Shinya was used to being slandered. He was the trouble magnet, the problem child; nothing he did was ever good enough for anybody. The best thing he’d ever done was lose. Sooner or later Okuma was going to realize that hanging around Shinya wasn’t worth the trouble, and he’d leave.

Shinya could wish it was now, right?

“You know, you’re the only person who knows about him,” Okuma said. “My friends’ll probably think I’m gross if I try to talk to them about it. Higuchi, definitely. He thinks being gay is some kind of brain disease.”

“You won’t know until you tell them,” Shinya said.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to,” Okuma said. He stirred the ice in his glass and drank the dregs at the bottom. “ _You_ might like being alone, but I don’t. Unless you’re saying you’ll be friends with me if they all leave?”

“If they don’t like you for who you are, why be friends with them?”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t have friends.”

That wasn’t true; he had Kaoru. Kaoru, who’d probably be grossed out if Shinya ever mentioned maybe having a crush on him. Kaoru, who’d leave if he learned the things Shinya had been thinking about him lately.

Life sucked.

Okuma called the waitress over for a refill. Shinya scraped up another bite of food—still tasteless—and nearly choked on it when Kaoru walked by. Shinya sunk low in his seat.

Kaoru was supposed to be studying. Sure, he was getting his books out, but he wasn’t supposed to be _here_. The plan was to meet up at his apartment—they were supposed to make curry—Kaoru had sounded excited about it—

And then, of course, Kaoru noticed him. Brief confusion made way for excitement that lit up his face; Shinya fixed his gaze on his plate and the last few bites of his omelet as his own heated up.

God, life sucked.

So did Okuma asking, “Do you know him?”

Shinya couldn’t answer except to groan. Of course Kaoru was packing up and coming over; of course the first thing he said, standing by the table, was, “Hey, Shinya. I thought something came up tonight?”

“He came up,” Shinya mumbled.

“I’m Ryo Okuma,” Okuma said, bowing in his seat.

Kaoru returned it, gave his own name, and asked, “Mind if I sit down?”

“Only if you tell me how you know surly Oda over here.”

“I’m not surly,” Shinya objected to a ketchup smear.

“Oh,” Kaoru said. “Well, sure, but…” There was a pause. It was obvious he was contemplating mentioning his dad’s store but threw it out quickly. Mr. Iwai barely tolerated Shinya in his shop; he wouldn’t like to have a bunch of kids showing up at all hours. “It’s kind of boring,” he settled on. “He was playing a game and I asked him about it.”

“That’s all?”

“I can be persistent.”

Kaoru would push his glasses back into place about now—yeah, there went his hand—and Shinya became even more aware of how close Okuma was sitting with Kaoru’s shoes touching his. If Shinya tried to give himself space, he would fall off the seat.

What did they look like in Kaoru’s eyes? Just classmates? Just friends?

“Was it that weird app game? You know, the one that just disappeared?” Okuma asked.

“Oh”—another pause, probably Kaoru looking to Shinya for how much to divulge. Not Prim, they’d both agreed after that final battle. Not in public, not where people could hear—“uh, yeah, actually. I asked him what the plot was since it seemed interesting, but he didn’t know. He’d just been running around fighting anything he could find.”

They went back and forth like that for a few minutes. The waitress came around to get Kaoru’s order; Okuma asked for another refill. They were going to outstay their welcome at this rate, but neither Kaoru nor Okuma seemed to care.

“So,” Okuma asked, “what made you show up here? You had plans?”

“Just a study group,” Kaoru said, his feet squeezing one of Shinya’s. Worrying, Shinya guessed. He hadn’t said a word so far. “Since he has entrance exams and I’ve got finals, we were going to study together.”

Okuma groaned. “Don’t remind me about entrance exams. I don’t want to think about them. My ex and I were going to apply to the same school, but now I don’t know if I should try for it anymore. It’d be too hard, seeing them everyday like that.”

“Tell me about it,” Kaoru agreed, and for the first time since he came over, Shinya looked at him. He looked like he always did: eyes crinkled, nose a bit scrunched, lips quirked as he enjoyed someone else’s company.

But—why was he nodding like he knew all about it? Why did he sound so sympathetic?

(Because it was Kaoru, some part of Shinya’s brain said.

Because he knew, shrieked another. He knew. It had _happened_ to him.)

But Kaoru went on, saying, “Some of my classmates went through the same thing. The thought of being separated from the one you love—or having to face someone you fell out with—it’s difficult to describe, isn’t it? But it’s hard. I didn’t want to consider colleges outside the city, for my dad’s sake, but…”

But Mr. Iwai had insisted that Kaoru would be wasting his potential if he didn’t try to get in somewhere else. Shinya had been there; he’d had to sit through the _eventually you’re going to have to leave and I’m going to have to deal with it_ lecture, feeling just as berated as Kaoru did.

None of them mentioned whether Shinya’s mom would let him leave or not. He’d probably be stuck within city limits, inside her apartment, until the second he turned twenty. Would he know what to do with all that freedom once he was?

… And Shinya had the sneaking suspicion Kaoru had considered colleges in the area for his sake, too. If Kaoru left, Shinya wouldn’t have anyone. Not even Mr. Iwai wanted him around all the time.

“I didn’t get into any of them,” Kaoru finished.

“Geez, you’re a better kid than me,” Okuma said. “I can’t wait to get out of here. Maybe I’ll come back later, but right now Tokyo’s just so stifling.”

Kaoru laughed along, amicable as always. He said a quick _thanks for the food_ when his meal arrived, and the table went quiet. Okuma’s phone buzzed; Shinya felt it in his pocket.

Okuma’s light grin fell as he read the message. “I should get going,” he declared. “Stuff to do at home and all that. It was nice meeting you, Iwai.”

He grabbed at the bags next to Kaoru as he said it; Kaoru passed him the one he didn’t recognize, the sky-blue strap swinging over the table—a clownfish; it had probably come from the aquarium—and Okuma took it, then slapped a bill down. Shinya moved out of the booth to let him leave.

Okuma fixed him with a look he couldn’t recognize. Maybe he’d noticed the feet shuffling under the table. “See you after break, Oda.”

“Yeah,” Shinya said, wishing his arm was still captive, just so Okuma would have to drag him out of here. “See you.”

Then Okuma was gone. Shinya’s meal, tasteless as ever, sat waiting on the table; he sat back down.

“I didn’t know you’d been making friends at school,” Kaoru said, and Shinya groaned.

“We aren’t friends. I did something dumb and now he won’t leave me alone.”

“Huh. Sounds familiar.”

It did, which wasn’t fair. If only Kaoru were Okuma, with a recent ex-boyfriend. If only Shinya knew whether Kaoru liked guys or not—but maybe that would be too much. His stupid brain would take that and run with it.

(Maybe, if their situations were reversed, Shinya would be falling for Okuma instead.

It was too confusing. Why did feelings have to be so _hard_?)

“So,” Kaoru said, drawing it out, making sure he had Shinya’s attention. He always did, but maybe he didn’t know that Shinya hung onto every word, lately. “You’ve been acting kind of weird, lately. Is it your mom? Is she giving you trouble?”

Shinya’s mom had nothing to do with this, but it was the easiest way out. “She doesn’t like how much my first-choice high school is in tuition,” Shinya said. “I told her the cheaper ones aren’t better. She started crying.”

Because sending her son to a lesser school meant failure as a mother. Because having Shinya insist on going to his first-choice gave her migraines, and what kind of mother was she if she couldn’t control her own son? Because more tuition meant less time for her to watch over him like a hawk. She’d have to pick up more hours, maybe another job.

She wouldn’t hear Shinya’s arguments that he could find a job himself.

He asked, “Do you ever think you’re always going to be a baby in your dad’s eyes? Like sometimes he looks at you like you’re… not how he remembers, and he can’t stand it?”

“Hm, sometimes,” Kaoru said, then took another bite. “But I think all parents do that. Just as they get used to you one way, you’re another, and that never stops.”

Like a dog, he didn’t say. Like a pet.

Shinya felt like one sometimes.

He scuffed his shoe under the table and hit Kaoru’s.

Kaoru glanced up, his glasses faintly fogged from food steam, his cheek still bulging with a bite. Shinya stared at his plate and admitted, “And I’ve been thinking about Prim, too. There was—some guy, on the street, playing that song, and it got me thinking.”

“Oh,” was all Kaoru said, with that sympathetic look again, as if he could see the guilt churning in Shinya’s stomach and flooding his veins. Shinya had almost killed the people she loved the most. Shinya had almost taken everything from her.

He ate.

It would—it would be so easy to say _I think I like you_ right now, in a crowded restaurant. It would be so easy to mistake Kaoru’s choked reaction as having taken too big of a bite, or his disgust with being unimpressed by the food.

It would be so easy—but the words were stuck in Shinya’s throat. Once he said them, he wouldn’t be able to take them back. Kaoru, if he wasn’t disgusted and wanting nothing more to do with him, would ask him to explain. Shinya barely understood it himself.

 _There’s a freckle on your back and I want to lick it_ seemed hardly the right kind of explanation. It was creepy. Kaoru trusted him.

Shinya didn’t want to lose that, but he wasn’t sure how much longer this could go on.

Not forever. The truth would come out someday.

But not today, with Prim settled firmly between them.

“I think I’ve got it at home,” Kaoru finally said, once he was ready. “That Sakaki guy ripped it from his video and mixed it; it won’t be the same, but, if you’d like…”

It wouldn’t have Prim in it, shakily singing along, her voice broken by the strain of fighting off Shinya’s control and the terror of failing to. Or, if it did, it wouldn’t be _his_ Prim.

But, even if it was just to hear it again, and imagine her there, singing along…

“Yeah,” Shinya said. “I’d like that.”


	2. The Confession, Part Two

Shinya spent the day before Christmas Eve at home, with nothing to do except flip through his textbooks and browse old forum posts. There were honest-to-god linguists in there, trying to deconstruct sentence structure and figure out the grammar. They’d begged the admin for anything else, anything at all, and he’d responded with a single audio file of that Ion guy singing to himself and then launching into a brief explanation.

 **I forgot I had it** , the admin admitted.

The whole thing was weird. How the app got onto so many phones, how it vanished without a trace if you failed, how it involved a pair of now-infamous missing kids…

Shinya tried not to think about that, turning his hands over to the workbook he’d been flipping through. History. Talk about boring.

It was still boring as he flipped through it on the train to Kaoru’s place the next day, somehow more aware than ever of all the couples around him: pairs holding hands at the standing rails and in their seats; pairs practically crawling into each other’s laps and fighting to occupy the same space, pressed so close together that one would think it was rush hour except for the space left on the car’s floor.

It made him sick. At the same time, he wanted nothing more than to do it with Kaoru.

He buried his face in his workbook, ignoring the soft whispers and coos of the couples around him. He nearly tripped on his way out, refusing to look up long enough to see where he was going.

Mr. Iwai greeted him at the door. Shinya brushed snow off his hair, tucked his history book in his bag, and fumbled his shoes and coat off. He handed over the mochi he’d bought for the soup Kaoru wanted to make for New Year’s, bought at the 777 down the street, the ones with a bit of damage that had other customers turning up their noses at them.

Who cared? As long as they tasted good, what did it matter?

“Thanks,” Mr. Iwai said, then snorted. “At this rate it’s gonna be mochi and red-bean soup for the next couple weeks. You think we got enough?”

Shinya looked at the pile sitting on the kitchen table. There were stacks and stacks of mochi, some of them still tied up in shopping bags. Kaoru looked over his shoulder from his spot at the stove and said, “I’m not making all this soup just for us, okay?”

Mr. Iwai snorted. “Right. That girlfriend of yours.”

The.

The what.

“Her parents both work and they won’t have time to make any,” Kaoru was saying. Shinya was aware of it, even though all he could hear was the word _girlfriend_ over and over again. “I just thought it’d be nice. Shinya can take some home, too.”

Pity food. Perfect. “Thanks,” Shinya forced out.

He waited for the inevitable _and she’s not my girlfriend_ —it never came. Kaoru’s phone pinged; he checked it, turned the stove off, and shoved his apron at his dad.

“Don’t let that burn, I have to go pick something up,” Kaoru said, and was out the door.

“Huh,” Mr. Iwai said, pulling the apron over his head. “Never seen him ignore ya like that.”

It was revenge for the diner. It had to be. “He’s just being a busybody,” Shinya said, sitting at the table and fiddling with his contribution to the mochi pile.

“You can say that again.”

“He’s just preoccupied,” Shinya said instead. “It’s Christmas Eve. He has a—”

He couldn’t say it. Like at the diner, he choked on the word.

God _damn_ it.

“Thought he told you,” Mr. Iwai said.

Shinya shook his head. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense: Kaoru was nice, and kind, and forgiving. He was persistent. When there was something he wanted to know, he pursued it relentlessly. When there was someone he wanted to befriend, he did the same. And he was smart, and was filling out a bit with an after-cram-school gym routine; any girl would be happy to hang off his arm like candy.

But.

Fuck.

A _girlfriend_? His Kaoru?

( _His_ Kaoru?)

“Shit, kid, it’s not the end of the world,” Mr. Iwai said, noticing Shinya’s shaky breaths. His whole damn head had gone thick with tears—Shinya thought he wasn’t the type to cry, but this had to be an exception—and he pressed the heels of hands into his eyes, the better to keep them in.

It didn’t work. They slipped out anyway.

Not Kaoru. Not Kaoru—but what did Shinya expect? For Kaoru to be just as miserable as Shinya was? For him to stay that way? For no one else on the entire fucking earth to look past the weird birthmark on his neck and call him a friend? For no one to love him?

Because that would be criminal—Kaoru deserved it. He deserved all of the love in the world.

“Hey, come on,” Mr. Iwai said, taking great pains to be careful as he placed a hand on Shinya’s shoulder. “I know I’m not Kaoru, and I’m not the best at talking things out, but… You can tell me. Okay?”

 _Great_ , Shinya thought. Another person who wanted to listen as he spewed up worthless junk to the tune of _maybe I do_ and _I think_. Nothing concrete, nothing for sure…

The only thing he was sure of was that he’d seen the freckle on Kaoru’s back in this kitchen. He’d seen it before, but it was different, then. Different in a way he still didn’t understand—why did he want to touch it now, and not before? Why did everything Kaoru did make Shinya feel like a fire was being stoked in his heart? Why did the thought of Kaoru being happy with someone else make him so miserable?

“Sorry,” he managed to get out. “I think I—I don’t feel so good.”

If Mr. Iwai suspected it was a lie, he didn’t show it. “That so? You should get home, then. Your mom will worry.”

“Yeah,” he said. She worried all the time anyway; what would this matter?

(She was working overtime tonight. She’d complained about it all morning throughout breakfast and clean-up. She always worked overtime on Christmas Eve; it was like her bosses didn’t care she had a kid.)

Mr. Iwai followed him back to the genkan, where he fumbled once more with his shoes and coat. He wiped his eyes on his scarf. For a second, he thought about saying it: _I think I love Kaoru._

But Mr. Iwai wouldn’t take to that, he thought. He definitely didn’t act like a progressive guy, gun shop and tattoos—Shinya had seen a whole sleeve of them on his arm once, like his skin was some kind of canvas, and Mr. Iwai had laughed when he asked if it had hurt—and rough former-yakuza past. But maybe he was all bluster. Maybe he couldn’t help it.

“Kid,” Mr. Iwai said as Shinya grabbed up his bag, “I mean it. I’m not Kaoru, but I’ll be damned if I don’t try and help a little here and there, got that? If it’s something you can’t trust him with, I’ll be happy to listen.”

Shinya’s ears burned with the memory of fresh stabs and hot blood, sliding down his neck to stain his collar. His mom had gotten even angrier at the sight of it, and yet she never made him wrap a towel around his neck to catch it. It was some kind of punishment—how could it not be?—and Shinya was determined to wait it out.

But, this. No, he had to—to think on it some more. Yeah.

“Thanks, Mr. Iwai,” he told the man. “I’ll do that.”

And, on his way home, wondered when _like_ had turned to _love_.

* * *

On New Year’s Eve, when Shinya woke in the morning, the first thing he was aware of was his mom, standing at his bedside. She glared down at him, disdain in every pore, her hands clasping each other tightly enough that he could see the fine bones of her knuckles.

“Mom?” he asked, voice too thick with sleep for it to be anything other than a grumble.

“Take a shower, Shinya,” she ordered, sharply, “and put your clothes in the wash. I’ll hang them out to dry before I leave for work.”

“You will? But—” He stretched—

—and became aware of the cold stickiness on his thighs, across his stomach. It didn’t feel like piss; it felt like he’d poured glue on himself and let it half-dry.

“You won’t have time for breakfast, at this rate,” she added. “Hurry up. I have work to get to.”

“I—yeah,” he said, though she didn’t wait to hear it; with one last glare she strode out of the room, leaving him behind to struggle out of bed and check his sheets for residue.

They looked clean, but just in case, he’d wash them, too.

He ignored the bent latch in the wall on his way to the bathroom, though he couldn’t ignore the splinters that dug into his foot or the sizable chunk of the door frame that had been pried out. His door was still locked when he checked it while getting some clean clothes together; she hadn’t even bothered to take the screwdriver with her. He kicked it out of the way, feeling more disgusting by the minute.

Not even a shower made him feel better. He spent minutes scrubbing until his skin was red and raw, and even then still felt it clinging to him. He could scrub until he bled and it wouldn’t matter—it had happened, and his mom hated him for it.

Did he talk in his sleep? Did he say Kaoru’s name? Was that why she wouldn’t look at him all throughout breakfast? Was that why she kicked him out as soon as he was done eating?

Fuck.

Where was he even supposed to go? School was out for break. He didn’t have job. He could visit Kaoru, but with the way he’d been acting lately, it was likely to wind up with Shinya fleeing the apartment after another episode.

The freckle. Breaking down crying—and in front of Kaoru’s dad, no less. God.

_Fuck._

But… he had nowhere else to go. He’d never bothered to get Mr. Mori’s contact info—as if the teacher would want him around on such an important holiday, if he was still in the city at all—or Okuma’s—as if he could stand Okuma for more than two minutes; every conversation they had so far had been about Shinya’s mom or Okuma’s ex being shit.

Unotuchable was closed on holidays. For family time, Mr. Iwai said; Shinya was pretty sure he just wanted a break. He ran the shop all by himself, every day of the week. It had to be tiring.

Kaoru’s it was, then.

… Even if Kaoru wasn’t home, as Mr. Iwai told him as he shucked off his shoes and coat and winced at the rawness of his stomach. Everything hurt, and he’d done it to himself.

“He’s out with his girlfriend today,” Mr. Iwai said, “but you’re welcome to hang around, if you want. Got some things that need fixing, too, if you feel like learning.”

He didn’t. He did.

Mr. Iwai was a pretty good teacher, if Shinya was being honest. He didn’t hog the tools and he always took a step back to let Shinya see the problem himself: a clogged drain, a blocked vent, a hole in the wall no bigger than a pinprick. Shinya watched an ant crawl through before Mr. Iwai snatched it up with a tissue.

All the work barely took an hour. Mr. Iwai sat in his chair with a stack of magazines—airsoft catalogs, model hobbyists, survival games—and Shinya settled down on the couch to watch TV and wound up flipping through channels, bored with the New Year’s specials and countdowns. He’d spend a minute or two listening to fake live audiences cheer, or to a talk show, or to some idol cheerily (nauseatingly) give her thoughts on the top one hundred songs of the year.

God, what the hell.

“Kaoru’s got some games you can play,” Mr. Iwai said.

Shinya grunted. To get them he’d have to go into Kaoru’s room, and that was off limits. He didn’t trust himself in there anymore, especially alone. “Don’t feel like it.”

“That’s a surprise. Thought you liked ‘em.”

“Haven’t played any in a while,” Shinya said, which was technically true. He’d watched Kaoru suck at the latest _Legend of Hilda_ , but hadn’t wanted to play it himself. The last time he’d tried he’d gotten his ass kicked in by some centaur thing, and he was still stewing a month later.

“Losing interest?”

Shinya flopped on the couch and muted the TV; if they were going to have this conversation, he didn’t want an idol’s preppy giggle interrupting. The last time he’d wanted to play a game was… with Prim. Right after he’d lost her, for a week or two, he would tug out his phone any time he felt like playing. He’d tap the app, but the thing never loaded. **Thank you for playing** , it always said.

Shinya hadn’t wanted thanks. He’d wanted to save Prim.

“I guess so,” he said. “Everybody makes it a competition. It’s no fun when it’s like that.”

“You’ll find those types all over. Don’t mean ya gotta give it up, right?”

“It’s just games, geez,” he said, rolling over. The couch kind of smelled like Kaoru. Great. “Or is this some way of telling me that if I give it up, I’m gonna regret it later?”

Silence. Mr. Iwai flipped a page, then another. Shinya stared at the back of the couch—navy blue, with a darker patch that must have been where someone spilled some long-forgotten drink. Maybe Kaoru had done it. Maybe his girlfriend had done it.

“Hey,” Shinya said, “how do you know you’re in love?”

“You’re at that age already?”

“I’m fifteen,” he defended, though he didn’t know why. The kids in books and on TV were falling head over heels for each other at twelve or thirteen. Half his grade was hooking up. Okuma had an ex-boyfriend.

It felt like he’d lost, somehow, taking so long to fall in love.

Mr. Iwai just grunted. “Fifteen, huh,” he muttered to himself, and flipped another page.

“Yeah, fifteen. Do you remember being fifteen, old man, or was it so long ago you were eating dinosaurs?”

“Can it, kid,” Mr. Iwai snapped. Laughter took the worst out of the edge, but it didn’t last long; Mr. Iwai always sobered up quickly. “Fifteen, huh… I think I was worryin’ over whether to quit after I got my diploma. My folks needed money, high school cost ‘em money—I figured it was a good trade, to just be happy with where I got and help ‘em out.”

Shinya rolled back over, stared at ash-brown hair going gray as Mr. Iwai ducked his head low over the table. “You never went to high school?”

“Nah. Had more important things to do.”

Mr. Iwai had stopped browsing his magazine and was staring at the TV; it played some nonsense commercial that was all happy actors and bright, shiny teeth.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Told you, my folks needed money,” Mr. Iwai said. He shifted in his seat, shut his magazine, opened it again. “‘S’what happens when you get sick, kid. Bills don’t pay themselves; wishes don’t pay ‘em neither. So I quit school and picked up jobs, as many as I could take. Kinda forgot I was just a kid after a while, just some fifteen-year-old punk who didn’t know nothin’ but had to make a dime or two anyway. Never had time for all that love crap. Didn’t realize that wasn’t normal ‘til years later, when I got saddled with Kaoru.”

Shinya sat up. “Saddled with him?”

It took two to make a baby, didn’t it? Shinya never questioned why Kaoru didn’t have a mom—everyone questioned why he didn’t have a dad, and to turn around and do the same would make Shinya just like the rest of them—but…

“What, he never told you? After all that worryin’ you did, he didn’t say?”

“Uh, no,” Shinya said, trying to remember. There’d been that time last year when Kaoru had appendicitis and wound up in the hospital, and the time Kaoru was two hours late to one of their hangouts because of a train accident, and—

—and the time he’d gotten kidnapped by the yakuza. That was the reason Shinya couldn’t play Gun About anymore—staring down that barrel in the doorway, knowing that even if he wanted to, there was nothing he could do to stop a bullet—and was also the turning point of his mom’s behavior going downhill. If she’d trusted him before then, she didn’t after.

“I used to work with the yakuza,” Mr. Iwai said, rolling up a sleeve to remind Shinya of his tattoos. A red moon grinned from the inside of his wrist. “Not my best decision, but they paid well as long as I kept my mouth shut about it. Got indoctrinated a year after my eighteenth birthday. Kaoru’s ma showed up ‘bout ten years after, looking to sell him for some quick cash. He wasn’t any older than two. When I told her we didn’t buy kids, she left him and ran off. Never found her again. Don’t know who his real dad is, neither.”

“People _do_ that?”

Mr. Iwai shrugged. Obviously they did, or he wouldn’t be sitting here, talking about it.

What was worse, though: not knowing who either of your parents were, or being treated like shit by the one that stuck around?

“I say I got saddled with him, but it ain’t that simple.” Now he leaned back in his chair, shutting his eyes, reminiscing. “I watched him for a few months while the boss ‘n them waffled on what to do with the kid. When they finally said they’d rather just get rid of him, I put my foot down. Plenty of guys in the yakuza or on the streets were foster kids, see, and I’d gotten to know plenty of ‘em. Kaoru was just some kid. He didn’t do nothing to deserve that.

“So I told ‘em I’d take care of him. They practically laughed me out of the building, sayin’ a yakuza for a dad wouldn’t be no better than letting him go in the system. So I told ‘em I’d quit, and I did. What happened two years ago was just some more of the fallout. He wouldn’t’ve shot you; his target was Kaoru.”

Yeah, that had been obvious—Shinya had just been the extra guy in the room, the one that wasn’t accounted for. That didn’t mean he didn’t have nightmares about what could have gone wrong, though. That didn’t mean he didn’t still get nervous, thinking about what could have happened.

Mr. Iwai snorted. “‘N that dumb kid thought he was the reason I never got married. He thought nobody’d want some washed-up old yakuza flunkie with a kid. Nah, I just never had the drive for all that, so you shouldn’t be askin’ me what it’s like to be in love.”

“Some help you are, then,” Shinya muttered, but Mr. Iwai just laughed some more. It was a smoker’s laugh, he was realizing; Mr. Iwai must have kicked the habit when he quit the yakuza.

But… it didn’t help, knowing that some people went through life not even bothering to fall in love—

(As if it were a choice, as if Shinya had chosen to feel like this. If he had his way he’d be just like Mr. Iwai, single and happy that way. If he had his way, maybe he wouldn’t be preparing for some more of his mom’s irrational behavior, as if a wet dream was akin to stealing or murder; as if he could help having one.)

—and were perfectly fine with it.

“But,” Mr. Iwai said, “I did get some shit for it at first, in the yakuza. If you aren’t dating some pretty girl, they think you’re gay. If they think you’re gay, you gotta work twice as hard to climb the ladder. I had nothin’ better to do anyway, but it’ll always bug me. What’s so great about love, kid? What’s so great about runnin’ around making a fool of yourself and feelin’ like shit all the time?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking,” Shinya fired back. “I’m just fifteen. What do you expect from me?”

“For you to tell me what the hell’s been going on with you,” Mr. Iwai said. “Did you fall in love? Is that it?”

“If I knew—” He stopped himself. The conversation was just going to keep coming back to him, anyway; Mr. Iwai was an old fogey who’d said his piece and wanted to get back to why they were talking about this in the first place.

Maybe he suspected. Maybe that was why he was pushing it.

Shinya’s only other option was Kaoru himself, and it wasn’t going to happen.

And it wasn’t just about the freckle anymore. It was about the girlfriend Kaoru hadn’t told him about, and about the dream he’d had, and about his mom breaking into his room to watch him sleep.

But it all boiled down to, “I think I’m in love with Kaoru.”

Mr. Iwai grunted. He did not sound surprised.

“If I could stop, I would,” Shinya said. Kaoru always said that honesty was the best policy. “I don’t—I don’t _like_ feeling like this. I don’t like thinking about what kissing him might feel like. I don’t like—any of it. If I could stop—if it would just stop—”

“Feelings ain’t like that,” Mr. Iwai said. “If they just stopped whenever we wanted ‘em to, we wouldn’t be people anymore.”

Because it’d be like flipping a switch, and that was too convenient. Maybe there were people who could, but Shinya wasn’t one of them.

Mr. Iwai sighed. He rubbed a hand through the scruff on his chin, then fiddled with an earring. Then he laughed. “Kaoru, huh…”

“Yeah. Kaoru.”

It had to be weird. Shinya practically lived in the apartment now, only leaving for school and to sleep. He did his homework at the kitchen table; he had a set of clothes squirreled away in one of Kaoru’s drawers. On his latest shopping run, Kaoru almost bought him a toothbrush. The two of them were glued at the hip—until last week, until the freckle.

Fucking freckle.

But for some reason, Mr. Iwai kept laughing. He laughed so long that Shinya—who had been trying for a serious conversation and was more than a little peeved that it had been blown off so quickly—asked, a bit sharply, “What’s so funny about that?”

“Nothin’,” Mr. Iwai insisted, still laughing. It was more of a guffaw, both low and chortling, and it brought tears to his eyes. “Just—you—and Kaoru, huh? Guess I’m just relieved—you’re not like—like me, kid.”

Like him, loveless but happy? Shinya would gladly trade this feeling—this weird goddamned feeling of not just wanting or desiring to but _needing_ to run his hands all over Kaoru’s back, just to hear what kinds of sounds he made. Shinya already had his friendship, and now he wanted more: he wanted Kaoru to look at him and only him in a crowded room; he wanted Kaoru to think of making him soup before his girlfriend; he wanted Kaoru’s girlfriend to disappear, so Shinya could go back to hogging all of Kaoru’s free time.

Shinya grit his teeth. He’d give anything for things to go back to normal, and Mr. Iwai was laughing about it. “It’s not funny,” he said.

“It’s botherin’ you that bad?”

“He has a girlfriend,” Shinya reminded him. “He’s in college! Aren’t you going to be responsible and tell me it’s not going to work out?”

Mr. Iwai sobered up quickly, wiping a few stray tears from the corners of his eyes. “So you’re worried he don’t like you back. Like that, I mean.”

“It’s obvious he doesn’t.” Shinya frowned at the TV, now showing some music video that looked like it was shot by some guy having a seizure. He grimaced and turned it off. “And if he doesn’t, I don’t want to feel like this. It’s—”

Weird. Wrong. Fucking embarrassing, but that was just this morning with his mom; he’d have to get a different kind of lock. A bolt, maybe.

But it was right, too. It felt right to like Kaoru. It felt right to want to be close to him, and to want to hold him, and even to kiss him. It almost didn’t matter if Kaoru liked him back; Shinya would take anything Kaoru would let him have, girlfriend or not, but he would be nothing, then. They’d never be able to go back to being just friends, if they did. If Kaoru let him. If Shinya let himself.

“It’s?” Mr. Iwai pressed.

Shinya shook his head. He wanted it—he didn’t want it—he dreaded things staying the same and things changing. Something would have to change; something was already changing, had already changed, and there was nothing Shinya could do about it. He was as powerless to fight it as he was to fight off his schoolyard bullies, and all he could see was the disgusted stares of his classmates, his mom, people on the street, Kaoru—

“It’s gross,” he finally said. “I don’t have to be a genius to know that, and it makes me feel gross, too. It’s not wrong but it’s not—”

It wasn’t the way he wanted to be. As right as it felt to like Kaoru—even if Shinya had never entertained thoughts of marrying some pretty girl and having kids and Kaoru being there, every step of the way—Shinya didn’t want it. Some niggling feeling in his gut told him it would all end in failure, anyway.

“It’s not wrong but it’s not normal?” Mr. Iwai guessed.

“I guess.”

Keys jingled over at the entrance; Kaoru, at the door, a greeting on his lips and a bag in his hand. He was so happy he was beaming; Shinya’s breath caught in his throat.

“Shinya’s here?” he asked, pausing at the extra pair of shoes at the genkan. Straightening them out and tucking the laces in before starting on his own.

“Yeah,” Mr. Iwai said, as Shinya ducked his head to stare at the TV remote. “How’d it go?”

“Pretty good. She liked the soup.”

“She’d be crazy not to,” was Mr. Iwai’s response, his gaze burning a hole in the side of Shinya’s head.

Fucking hell, old man.

Kaoru moved over to the kitchen, setting his bag down on the table and rummaging through the fridge. “Shinya’s is still in here, right?”

“Should be. Did you get the mail?”

“It wasn’t there when I looked.”

Mr. Iwai grunted. He stood, cracked his back, and said, “Forgot I need to pick something up. I’ll check for it when I get back.”

“You could have asked. I would have picked it up.”

“Said I forgot, didn’t I? ‘Sides, I could use the exercise. See you kids in a bit.”

Shinya watched him shrug his heavy coat on, toe on his loafers, and shove his hat on out of the corner of his eye; then it was just him and Kaoru, alone.

Fucking _hell_ , old man.

“You haven’t eaten yet, right, Shinya?” Kaoru called from the kitchen. “Want some soup?”

“Sure,” Shinya said, reading the buttons on the remote: Input; Mute; Menu. Volume Control; Channel; Guide. He ignored the crack in his voice. He hadn’t laughed at Kaoru’s but couldn’t shake the thought of Kaoru laughing at him for it, and the jittery, squirming feeling was back. He wanted to get up and march over to Kaoru for a long hug; he wanted to fling himself off their tiny balcony before he did so.

Fucking. Hell.

“Here,” Kaoru said, placing down a bowl of red bean soup. Pieces of mochi floated in it like the aftermath of a gruesome bloodbath.

“Thanks,” Shinya said, taking up his spoon, saying the usual thanks for the food, and then prodding at it. Kaoru dug right in, a bracelet on his arm clinking against the side of the bowl. A present from his girlfriend, Shinya thought. Kaoru had never been one for jewelry, even if it was the leather-and-bead kind.

There was no conversation. Kaoru didn’t start one, as he usually did, and Shinya’s stomach roiled at the thought of talking any more, much less eating—but he hated having things like this. Why couldn’t everything go back to the way it was? Why couldn’t he go back to being a boy hanging out with his best friend, instead of wondering what it would feel like to have Kaoru’s tongue lap soup off his skin—

Shinya threw his spoon down. He gripped at his hair and shut his eyes and willed the goddamn thought away, but it came back stronger than ever: Kaoru feeding him soup, broth dripping down his chin; Kaoru leaning in to lick a wet stripe up to Shinya’s lips.

“Shinya?” the real Kaoru was asking. He was hovering, half out of his seat, one hand hot on Shinya’s back. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

Everything was wrong. How he was feeling about Kaoru— _Kaoru_ , with a _girlfriend_ —and the things he was thinking—it was all wrong. Not normal, like Mr. Iwai had said.

But it wasn’t wrong, some little part of him insisted. It was Kaoru. The only thing that was wrong was that Shinya was thinking about Kaoru as if he didn’t have a girlfriend, one he loved enough to make soup for. One he’d never told Shinya about.

And Shinya was tired of Kaoru hiding secrets. He was tired of hiding secrets from Kaoru, too.

“Everything’s wrong,” Shinya said, shoving Kaoru’s hand away, pretending he didn’t get a glimpse of the shock on Kaoru’s face as he fell back into his seat. “Just—fucking _everything_. You have a girlfriend. Mom broke into my room. Some guy at school seems to think I’m a dumping ground for all his problems. And I love you.”

“Uh,” Kaoru said, his hands wavering in the air. “What?”

“You heard me!”

“I did! I did hear you; I just—one thing at a time, okay?” He paused, took his glasses off to scrub at his face, put them back on. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Emi. We met at cram school last year; she’d love to meet you.”

“I don’t care about meeting her,” Shinya snapped. “I care about you not saying anything.”

“That’s fair,” Kaoru said, calm as ever, with just the slightest hint of panic in his voice. “So—first, before we talk about any more, will you let go? Please? That looks like it hurts.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Shinya said, vaguely aware of one hand still trying to rip his hair out at the roots. The other was pressed in a fist against the side of his head, the better to keep Kaoru away.

“I know,” Kaoru said. He coaxed the fist open, but not until Shinya had smacked him a few times with it. Kaoru pressed his fingers into the lines Shinya’s nails had dug into his palm. “And we don’t have to talk about Emi right now. Okay? How about—your classmate. Was he the one from the diner? The really clingy one?”

“You shouldn’t be doing this.”

Kaoru’s fingers froze. “Shinya—”

“Shut up,” Shinya said. He couldn’t stop staring at his hand, with Kaoru’s fingers there, ripe for the taking. If Shinya grabbed hold he would never let go. He ripped it out of Kaoru’s grasp and pressed it back to his face, where the heat in his blood was blurring his vision.

No, he was crying. _Again_. “I love you. Didn’t you hear that? Don’t make me think I have a chance when you have a girlfriend, for fuck’s sake!”

“I heard you, but—”

“There’s no buts!” Shinya yelled. He kicked at Kaoru’s nearing knee, pushed himself as far away as he could get. “Just don’t! Don’t, okay?!”

“Okay,” Kaoru agreed, too quickly. In all the time they’d known each other, Shinya had never seen him like this: hands wavering, fingers curled to grasp; his eyes wide with panic and fear, all the calm from a few moments ago wiped off his face. “Okay. See? I won’t. I promise I won’t, Shinya, so please let go. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

It was too late for that. Shinya’s mom certainly had no qualms about hurting him; why did he have to care, too?

He still unwound his fingers from his hair. It was Kaoru, and Shinya couldn’t stand to make him worry, and when they were gone his scalp stung, protesting as it always did to such rough treatment. He rubbed at the sore spot.

Kaoru asked, “You really love me?”

“Yeah,” Shinya said, wishing his voice was stronger, that it didn’t come out so weak.

“And you’re jealous of Emi because she got to me first?”

“Yeah,” Shinya admitted. “I thought—we had Prim, you know? And even after she was gone, we still hung out together. I didn’t—I didn’t think anything of it back then, but—you held my hand a lot. We hugged a lot. If my mom saw, she’d hate you for a different reason.”

Kaoru stared at his hands, now in his lap. They twitched, as if he was fighting off the urge to do both. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.

“I know,” Shinya said, “and I didn’t want anything more. But now I do, so everything’s different. I don’t want you to do it anymore. That’s girlfriend stuff.”

“But—” Kaoru started to say, but stopped. No buts, just like Shinya asked; he sighed instead. “Is this why you’ve been avoiding me?”

“Yeah, it is.” There was no need to tell him that looking at his face—even his disappointed one, the sad one, the one right in front of him—made Shinya want to grab it, pulling him in close and not letting go until he was satisfied.

“Oh,” Kaoru said.

“Uh-huh, oh,” Shinya said. “So you shouldn’t anymore. Maybe we shouldn’t study together, either. It’s not like you’ve been learning anything from me.”

“I study enough on my own; you don’t need to worry about dragging me down,” Kaoru said. His voice dipped low. “You said your mom broke into your room? How? We bought that lock and everything; it was supposed to keep her out.”

Shinya shrugged. With his luck the mess was waiting for him. “She found a way.”

Kaoru took a breath, thought better of what he was going to say, then reached a hand out to Shinya, then thought better of that, too. It hung between them, his fingers trembling. “Shinya,” he said instead.

Instead of _that’s not normal._ Instead of _she shouldn’t be doing th_ _at_ _._ Instead of _doesn’t it scare you?_

Because they both knew it was, and that she shouldn’t, and that it didn’t—or it didn’t until this morning, when Shinya had woken to her glaring down at him like a dragon on its hoard facing down a knight. He was fifteen, for fuck’s sake. That shit wasn’t normal.

Shinya didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He’d said what he wanted, no more and no less, and now that Kaoru knew, the weird squirming feeling was gradually loosening. “Can I get a new spoon?” he asked.

Kaoru stared at him for a moment, then resigned himself to putting it all on hold for now—for forever, if Shinya had his way. “Sure,” he said.

The soup had gone cold. Shinya ate it anyway.

* * *

Shinya wound up staying later than he wanted at Kaoru’s. They dragged out his Swatch, plugged it into the TV, and sat around explaining the plot to a confused Mr. Iwai when he came back from his errands. If he noticed the careful distance between them he didn’t say so, just sitting back to comment on the weapon designs and the absurdity of some of the armor.

“Women’s clothes?” he asked at one point.

“I gotta get in somehow, and they’ll kick me out if I don’t look the part,” Kaoru intoned from his spot. “And I need those pumpkins she’s selling.”

Shinya nodded along, acting like he knew what was going on—it had been a while since he’d sat down and played a game, and it had been a while since he sat down with this one. Kaoru had gotten farther without him. For some reason that irked him.

At some point, when Kaoru’s hero was struggling through a desert storm with his map disabled, Shinya glanced at the clock, swore, and excused himself. Mr. Iwai saw him off at the door, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. Kaoru kept glancing over at them when he should have been focusing on the screen; he got ambushed by an assassin and died.

Shinya couldn’t bring himself to say their usual goodbyes. He walked out the door and left. His mom was home when he arrived, sitting at the table with dinner spread in front of her.

Weird. His mom usually worked late if she wasn’t gone by the time he woke up.

They ate dinner in a strained silence. His mom cleaned up the dishes while he took a proper bath, and he grimaced anew at the rawness of his stomach and on the insides of his thighs.

But he felt better, after. Now that the truth was out; now that Kaoru knew.

When he finally went back to his room, the mess from that morning was gone. Even the screwdriver was missing from where he’d put it on the desk—which seemed a little more barren than before—as he reached for his bag.

Except it wasn’t there, draped over the back of the chair as he’d left it.

 _Well, okay_ , he thought. Maybe he’d left it hanging on the coat rack. He did that often enough at Kaoru’s; he never needed anything from it once he was there. He turned, to go grab it—

—and ran straight into the door, the knob refusing to budge—and, now that he was looking at it, that looked different, too. The lock was gone.

 _Fuck_ , he thought. So she’d gotten pissed and changed the knob—Shinya had seen that coming, was surprised it had taken so long for her to notice—and locked him in, instead of the other way around.

Well, that was—

It was—

“I told you, didn’t I, Shinya,” she said from the other side of the door. “You shouldn’t be hanging around delinquents like that boy. If you’re good for the rest of break, I’ll consider giving you your phone back, but until then—”

He didn’t hear the rest of it. He was grounded, that much was obvious—but over a wet dream? Over something he couldn’t even _control_?

“He’s not a delinquent,” he defended anyway. “He’s _not_. In fact, he’s way better than you, you bitch.”

“You really have been hanging around him too much, Shinya.” She clicked her tongue. “You can’t even see that I just want what’s best for you.”

He wanted to laugh. “What’s best for me? Are you _kidding_?”

She didn’t answer, fed up or gone or livid enough to prefer stony silence. Shinya slowly, so slowly, on shaking legs that couldn’t seem to hold his weight, stepped back until he hit the bed. He barely felt himself sit; he couldn’t help but continue staring at the door, and the knob that wouldn’t turn. Then he looked at his desk and found that all of the novels Kaoru had given him were gone, as were the cords to his computer. His phone charger, usually in a tangled heap by the outlet—now covered with a steel plate screwed into the wall, and Shinya would love to see his mom talk her way out of that if they ever moved—was gone, too.

Shinya wasn’t sure how long he sat there, gaze moving between his desk and the door and the outlet. For a minute or two he considered making enough of a ruckus that his neighbors would complain, but all that would accomplish was making everything worse. His mom might not let him go back to school once break was over, if she thought he needed more discipline.

But— _fuck_. Seriously? Locked in his own room like some kind of prisoner, with no way to call for help if he needed it?

She was out of her mind. She always had been; Shinya had just been too blinded by the love he remembered to see it.

Not anymore. There wasn’t any love, and there hadn’t been for a long time.

So be it, he decided. If she wanted a war, she was going to get one.


	3. The Crime

Shinya didn’t show up on New Year’s.

Kaoru called and called, but Shinya’s voice mail’s automated message grated on his nerves; Emi tightened her hold on his free hand, and Dad drummed his fingers on the table.

“Kaoru,” Dad said, with a glance at the clock.

Kaoru huffed out, “I _know_ ,” and ended the most recent call.

It was going to be weird, doing their first shrine visit of the year without him. He’d always been there, hands shoved into his pockets against the cold, wool beanie pulled low over his ears. Sometimes Kaoru had wanted to ask what he’d wished for; sometimes he thought he knew.

(When had two years become always?)

“Maybe he’s visiting with his family,” said Emi, bless her. She knew nothing about Shinya other than that he was Kaoru’s friend and they hung out a lot.

“Yeah,” Kaoru said, knowing it wasn’t true—but it might have been. Shinya’s mom might have had a rare holiday off and dragged Shinya out with her. She wouldn’t let him answer his phone, then. Kaoru would just have to call him later.

He sighed. “Sorry. I just wanted you to meet him, too.”

“I don’t mind,” Emi assured him. “Some other time. Maybe after his exams are over we can have a—a picnic. Or an outing. We can eat and chat.”

Because all the stress over her internship had reduced her stomach to the size of a lemon. She could eat a few bites here and there but nothing more, and she was already planning the feast at the end of it all when all the eating she hadn’t done would catch up to her.

“Yeah,” he said. Shinya liked the diner. Dad did, too.

But as they set out and joined the crowds flocking to the shrine, Kaoru couldn’t get the niggling feeling out of his head, because—

Maybe it wasn’t that Shinya didn’t _want_ to come. Maybe it was because he couldn’t stand to be around Kaoru anymore, now that the truth was out: that Kaoru had a girlfriend and Shinya loved him.

Shinya loved _him_.

And Kaoru, stupid and cowardly, had tried to talk around it. He had Emi; what more did he need?

 _Shinya_ , his stupid, traitorous brain told him. Shinya by his side, holding his hand like Emi was, scoffing at the girls shivering in their New Year’s kimonos. Emi’s was red with a spattering chrysanthemums, the soft, pastel pink of the blossoms as familiar as the torii gates at the end of the road. There were hundreds of other girls out on the street, dressed just like Emi, cold despite their kimono’s layers and linings. Kaoru was certainly freezing despite his coat and thick jeans, but Emi showed no signs of the same save for the flush on her cheeks and the way she leaned closer to him as they walked.

It was the crowd, pushing them together as Dad lagged behind them. It had to be.

Strange, how he was still thinking that after three months of dating. That there had to be a reason other than her just wanting to be close to him and bask in his warmth in the cold. That there had to be a reason other than her just wanting to hold his hand.

He tried not to think about it.

Hours later, it came back. He was washing the dinner dishes and marveling at the heat of the water through his gloves; Dad was sitting by the TV in his usual chair, a forgotten catalog open on the low table, _The Legend of Hilda: Call of the Wild_ onscreen. He was lumbering through a goblin encampment, one of the first handful of the game, and grunted as he stepped in the fire.

“Can’t say I see the appeal,” Dad said, as a goblin smacked his hero with a club, sending him flying. “These are terrible weapons.”

“You can get better ones, they just show up later.”

Another grunt. Dad’s hero blundered through the fight, swinging first one club, then another, then the handful of sticks he’d picked up wandering through the forest. Kaoru heard them all break against the goblins’ death shrieks.

Kaoru put the last dish in the drying rack, dumped the washing water, and tugged his gloves off. He watched the suds drain as he tugged his phone out of his pocket, dialed Shinya, and hung up when it went to voicemail _again_.

“Still not picking up?” Dad asked.

“No,” Kaoru said. He thumped on the couch, in exactly the spot Shinya sat when he said _I love you_. “I’m worried.”

“Aren’t you always?”

“His mom broke into his room. As in, despite the lock. He didn’t tell me why but it can’t be good.”

Dad shrugged. “He’s at that age.”

“Isn’t that bad, then?” Kaoru asked. Dad would never, ever walk into Kaoru’s room without his permission, not even if the door was wide open and there were neon signs telling him to. Dad knew Kaoru was eighteen, going on nineteen. He knew what it meant.

“What if she can’t believe he’s growing up, you mean,” Dad said, clicking his tongue as the hero ran out of energy and fell off the cliff he’d been climbing. There was a tree at the top with apples hanging over the edge, and the hero’s supply was dangerously low for how often he was getting hurt.

“He told me he’s in love with me. What if that’s what she can’t stand?”

“Then that’s something they need to deal with themselves,” Dad said, pausing the game. Dad’s gaze was heavy, as it always was. Just another remnant of his yakuza days. “Kaoru, we can’t change how that woman thinks. We can’t change what she believes, either. She has to do that herself. The only thing we can do is be there for him, like we’ve been doing.”

“But what if something happens?”

Dad gave him a look. Kaoru hated that look; every single time they’d had this conversation, they’d repeated the same tired arguments with each other. Dad was sick of having to remind both of them that there wasn’t anything they could do. Shinya’s mom was his only family. If he lost her, he’d have no one.

But Kaoru couldn’t stand having to sit back and watch. Sure, he was slowly but surely teaching Shinya how to cook and clean, but those were things his mother should have done, and she hadn’t.

(He tried not to think of everything else she had done, instead.)

Kaoru turned away from the look to stare out the window—the gray cityscape spread out before him, the neon light of some store already lit but nearly blocked, the wisps of clouds against a blue sky shunted to a small corner by skyscrapers—and said, “You aren’t even surprised that he loves me?”

“He told me so himself,” Dad said. He set the controller down on his magazine; they watched each other in the glass. “And it don’t bother me. Least, it don’t bother me as much as it bothers you.”

“It doesn’t—” He stopped himself short. After that mess with the yakuza two years ago, they’d promised to be more honest with each other. No more secrets, not even half-ones.

“I have Emi,” he said instead. “I thought I’d be happy with her, but instead, I’m worrying about Shinya. I tried to study last night and stared at the same page for ten minutes and I—”

Kept thinking about Shinya, gripping his hair so hard his knuckles were white, face screwed up in pain he probably wasn’t registering. It had made him wonder if anyone had ever been gentle with Shinya before Kaoru came along. Likely not.

And he had kept thinking about the break-in, and the confession, and how they both felt tied together, as if Shinya had been saying, _maybe she knows, what do I do?_

But Kaoru didn’t know.

“And it felt weird when we went to the shrine earlier, too,” Kaoru went on, “because he wasn’t there. I wanted to—”

Hold his hand. Watch him laugh at the poser boys in their t-shirts when it was cold enough to freeze the snot dripping from their noses. Huddle together with hot cups of non-alcoholic amazake for the trip home.

Instead, he’d done those things with Emi. There was nothing wrong with her—Kaoru had done all of that with her before—but it had felt like a piece was missing. Like walking into his room and finding nothing there.

If Emi left, would he feel the same? As if something was missing? As if he’d been torn in half without knowing?

The realization must have shown on his face; Dad said, “Well, looks like you’ve figured something out.”

“Kind of,” Kaoru said, because while he could believe that Shinya loved him and that life wasn’t the same without him around, Kaoru couldn’t tell if he felt the same way back. There was no way love was as simple as wanting to hold Shinya’s hand, and Shinya didn’t make his heart race the same way Emi did.

But if Emi were to vanish into thin air tomorrow, Kaoru would be worried, sure, but he wouldn’t be devastated. Meanwhile Shinya ignoring his phone calls made him feel like the world was ending.

“Wanna share?” Dad asked.

So they could work through it together, with Dad stubbornly pushing the same topics over and over again. Dad didn’t understand love, not the kind that Kaoru was wrestling with. He should be grateful Dad was trying, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

As far as Kaoru knew, the only hand Dad had ever held was his. He’d gotten a long, one-armed hug over his high school admittance. He wasn’t an affectionate man, and in his mind kids holding hands with each other was enough of a clue that they were dating.

“Not yet,” Kaoru said, as the Swatch finally went into sleep mode. The low music cut off so abruptly Kaoru jumped at the sound of his own voice. Dad eyed him in the window, stern and serious and waiting.

Waiting, but not exactly accepting.

Kaoru turned from the window; Dad didn’t so much as move, still as a statue save for his eyes. “Let me think it over a little more. Feelings are complicated.”

That got Dad to snort laughter; he sat back, rolling his shoulders. “Sure thing,” he said. “But, Kaoru—I want you to know I am concerned ‘bout the kid. I ain’t just sayin’ we should keep our noses out of it, alright? If he’s really in trouble, he can come here anytime.”

What Dad meant: _if his mom really is abusing him, hurting him, if he absolutely can’t stay there anymore, then he can come here. He’s welcome here. He always is._

And nothing made Kaoru happier.

* * *

By the time school started back up again, Kaoru had called nearly fifteen times a day, sent enough text messages to push Shinya’s last one— **yeah im omw** —into whatever void old messages died in.

Kaoru was beside himself, but the last thing he could miss was school. The new term was starting; he couldn’t afford to miss class, couldn’t afford to skip two or three days of studying.

 _She broke into my room_ , he heard as he flipped through workbooks.

 _She held me down and cut it all off_ , he heard as he cooked dinner.

 _And I love you_ , he heard, late at night when he was trying to sleep.

According to Emi, the bags under his eyes were impressive. “Still worried?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he sighed, rubbed the soreness away. It wouldn’t last long. “I’m gonna go check up on him after school. I’ll probably be late for our study group, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She leaned in, kissed him goodbye, and headed for her classroom.

Kaoru ignored the whispers of his classmates and focused instead on the lingering taste of strawberries. No, no one was like Emi; but no one was like Shinya, either.

(And Emi was right where she belonged, where Kaoru didn’t have to worry over her every second of the day, wondering whether she got to school or ate lunch.)

It had been a long time since Kaoru had gone to Shinya’s apartment, but the building was the same as ever: the same drab color on the walls, the same dull nameplates, the same trepidation.

Last time he was here, Shinya’s mom had called him a delinquent. What would she call him now?

When he reached Shinya’s apartment, there was already a kid standing outside, trying to shove a packet through the mail slot in the door. It was too thick to fit and Kaoru heard it tear. “Damn it,” the kid cursed, and threw it on the floor.

“You could just leave it,” Kaoru said, eyeing the door and the **Oda** nameplate. Someone from Shinya’s school, then.

“Teach told me to make sure he got it, so no, I can’t,” said the kid. He tossed his hair out of his face—Kaoru recognized it from the diner, weeks and months ago. His name was on the tip of Kaoru’s tongue. Oku-something. He glared up at Kaoru and stood, brushing dirt off his pants. “You’re that guy from the diner.”

“So are you,” Kaoru said.

“You know what he’s got, then?” the kid asked. “Like, is it the flu or something? Oda isn’t the type to miss school over a fever.”

Because it meant staying home where his mom would fuss over and spit at him in turn. Shinya would rather cut class by sleeping in the nurse’s office than stay here.

“I didn’t know he was sick,” Kaoru admitted. He tried the door—locked, like he thought, the apartment quiet. Shinya’s room was in the back; if he really was that sick, he wouldn’t be able to make it to the door.

The kid gave him a dubious look. Kaoru took his phone out, showed him the dozens of missed calls, the unanswered texts. “This isn’t like him,” he said. “If he was sick, he’d tell me so I wouldn’t worry. Not hearing anything at all is worse than learning he’s got the flu.”

The kid glared at the door, envelope shoved under his arm. “You have some time?”

He didn’t. He was supposed to be heading to Emi’s study group.

But this was Shinya, and if the past week had told him anything, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate until Shinya was safe.

“Yeah,” Kaoru said.

There was a Starvicks down the street. The kid dropped the envelope off with the landlord—a rather easy-going older woman with shots of black in her gray hair and dozens of laugh lines around her face—and led the way, fussing with his hair.

Kaoru got a plain black coffee; the kid ordered some latte that sounded like it was half sugar.

“You think it’s his mom?” the kid asked, without warning, before Kaoru had even taken a sip. “I knocked and knocked, but nobody answered. She wouldn’t just leave him if he was sick, right?”

“I don’t know,” Kaoru said. “I’ve only met her twice, but she doesn’t seem like the type to.” She was more the type to hover over his bed or in his doorway and shove rice gruel down his throat until he puked it up. There was a movie about that, he thought. “Maybe he’s at the hospital? It could be worse than the flu.”

“If it was, she wouldn’t have told the school it was just the flu,” the kid said. He glared at his drink. “You—you’re his friend. You have to know what she’s like better than I do. Do you think it’s—I don’t know, something she’s done?”

 _She broke in._ Kaoru didn’t know the reason why, but whatever it was was only good for her. “I don’t know,” he said.

“But you clearly don’t think he’s okay!”

“Of course not. It’s not like him to ignore me like this, sure, but if he’s really sick I can’t blame him. Maybe his medication is making him sleepy; maybe that’s why his mom thought it was okay to leave him be for a while.”

“You’re making excuses.”

“I’m saying we don’t know anything. Once we do, that’ll be different.”

The kid glared at him now, over the table and the steam of Kaoru’s coffee. He took a sip and grimaced; too bitter. He dumped sugar in.

“But,” he added, “it doesn’t seem like it’s just the flu, no.”

_She broke in. And I love you. He’s at that age._

Kaoru remembered being fifteen and irritated by all of his sudden extra laundry. Dad had been the one to walk him through it: how it was normal, how even Dad had those issues every once in a while back then, how it meant he was growing up.

But Shinya’s mom didn’t seem the type to. If she admitted her little boy was growing up, she would have to admit that one day he would leave her, and that seemed like the last thing she wanted—or it did to Kaoru, anyway. She wanted her son to stay the same child he’d always been, overeager to share and agree with whatever she said.

But people changed. Kids grew up. Troublemakers could become studious; hard workers could become lazy and drained. Boys who shared everything with their mothers could become withdrawn.

“He kept visiting me even though she didn’t want him to,” Kaoru said. “He said he didn’t care what she wanted, since she could never make up her mind. Nothing ever happened, so I didn’t think much of it, but…”

“Nothing _happened_?” the kid scoffed. “Have you _seen_ his ears? You’re telling me that’s _nothing_?”

“No, that’s not—that’s not nothing,” Kaoru amended. “I just—when it did happen, he always came to see me. So now that he can’t, it feels… worse, somehow.”

It was almost as if Shinya was being taken away. Kaoru could understand being grounded, but he hadn’t been allowed to go to school? What was keeping him in that apartment?

The kid took a huge gulp of his drink before crossing his arms. “For all we know, he’s tied up in there. You think he has food? Or water? A way to use the bathroom?”

_She broke in._

“No,” Kaoru said. He let his chin rest on his hands, watched the steam from his coffee drift in lazy circles. A kid started to cry about not getting a cookie. He thought of Shinya’s mom, ready to do what she thought was best for him, whether it really was or not. “His mom wouldn’t think of that. She’d only think of keeping him in one spot until he caved, and starvation is a proven technique for that. Plus, if she’s his only source of interaction, he’ll come to love her faster.”

He’d read about it over the last two years or so, checking up on that forum. If she kept Shinya locked away, only feeding him when she had to, sooner or later he’d start to feel grateful for it. As if the bare minimum was something to grateful for.

“Or he’ll hate her guts even more and one of them will wind up dead,” said the kid, a bit too cheerful for Kaoru’s liking.

Kaoru shook his head. “Shinya wouldn’t do that. He’d only try to get away. She’s his mom; he still loves her—”

“He shouldn’t,” muttered the kid.

“—even if he can’t stand how she is, even if she hurts him. He wouldn’t want to hurt her.” He stared down at his coffee and dared another sip. Still too bitter. “He wouldn’t want to be like her.”

“That’s great, but it doesn’t solve the problem.”

“I know,” Kaoru said. “We don’t know if he’s really sick or not, and we don’t know if he’s being trapped in there against his will, either. There’s next to nothing he can do to contact us…”

He trailed off. Shinya’s room had a window. Their apartment was on the fourth floor—a bit too high for him to jump out of safely—but he could drop messages. Letters or notes.

If he thought of it. If he realized someone would eventually come to check on him and fail. Shinya wasn’t the kind of guy to sulk for very long; at some point he’d want to be productive, even if he was locked up in his room, unable to move due to fever.

Kaoru shot out of his seat. The kid protested as he ran out the door, drink forgotten on the table.

(It was too bitter anyway. Shinya would laugh at him for buying it, but he hadn’t wanted something he’d enjoy. Not now. Not when anything could be happening to Shinya.)

He ran back to the apartment building, then ducked down the alley in the back. It was dark, and despite the landlord’s efforts, had an odd smell to it.

Kaoru tried to count the windows, but in the gloom he lost track. He went from one end of the building to the other, aware of the kid calling his name from the street.

Great. The kid could remember his name, but Kaoru couldn’t do the same.

He circled back around, tugged the kid back behind the building, started to explain what he was doing—

Something bounced off his head. A ball of paper. **You shouldn’t be here.**

He glanced up but was only vaguely aware of some shape in the dark.

It was Shinya. It had to be.

 **You need to leave** , on another ball. **She’ll catch you.**

“What is she, a witch?” the kid muttered.

“I think we’ve already established that,” Kaoru said. “I wish we could ask him something, but shouting might get us in trouble.”

Another ball: **I’m okay. Go home.**

“Yeah, right,” said the kid. “He’s not okay. He’s throwing paper from a window because he can’t leave his room.”

Kaoru was liking this kid more and more. Shinya was just going to have to deal with a pair of persistent friends who wouldn’t take _go away, dumbass_ for an answer.

“He’s right, though,” Kaoru said, as his phone began to buzz in his pocket. Emi, or Dad, wanting to know where he was. “We should go. He’ll need more handouts tomorrow, right? If he’s still sick?”

The kid looked confused for all of two seconds before realization hit—they could ferry notes to Shinya, give him more paper. If everything was as bad as they thought, he’d need the help.

“Yeah,” the kid agreed, with a slow, sly grin. He stretched his arms over his head, then—deliberately, Kaoru assumed—locked arms with him. He could only hope that they were nothing more than shadows in the dark as the kid dragged him away, Shinya’s warnings crumpling in his hands. **I’m home** , that last one read, mangled and _wrong_.

Shinya wasn’t going to be home until he was out of there. Kaoru wasn’t going to stand by and let him wither away, either.

He pressed a hand to his collar. He’d stared at it so often in the mirror the shape of his birthmark was burned into his mind, and he traced it through the fabric. It wasn’t quite gecko-shaped like Dad’s tattoo, but it didn’t matter: he and Dad had gone through tough times and come out better for it on the other end, and now…

Now it was Shinya’s turn.

* * *

Two weeks went by. Okuma staked out Shinya’s apartment after school; Shinya’s mom came and went at her leisure, but Shinya never made an appearance, instead throwing notes out his window for Okuma to pick up.

Kaoru read through his latest with a mounting sense of dread. **I told you I’m fine** , Shinya wrote. **You don’t need to keep coming around. If she finds out what you’re doing, you’re dead.**

“She doesn’t seem to have a set work schedule, either,” Okuma told him. “She’ll be out until the last train leaves one night and then in by five the next. Even if we wanted to try and get him out—”

He broke off, staring at something over Kaoru’s shoulder before ducking under the table.

“Okuma?” Kaoru asked.

“Not here!” Okuma hissed.

The diner in Shibuya was usually packed, but on a night like tonight, when the sky dripped slush that threatened to freeze overnight, the place was empty. A few of the waiters were wandering around, checking on anyone who dared to brave the weather for Nostalgic Steak or Surprise Sandwiches, and a trio of kids in Okuma’s and Shinya’s uniforms were settling in at a table, already chattering about what they were in the mood for and dragging notebooks out of their bags.

“You aren’t hiding very well,” Kaoru said. They were sitting in the corner booth. Anyone could see Okuma hiding under the table.

Okuma glared at him over the edge. “Don’t judge me,” he hissed.

“I’m not judging, I’m stating a fact. Look, you’ve spooked the waitress.”

She hurried over. Kaoru dropped his pen on the floor, just in time for the waitress to watch Okuma to triumphantly emerge from under the table, pen in hand. He threw it at Kaoru.

Kaoru ordered a Fruitea for the both of them, just to spite him. Okuma hated fruity drinks. Shinya could never get enough.

Kaoru really, really hoped he was alright. Exams were almost at hand. He was trying to study, but more often than not he found himself pulling Shinya’s notes out of his drawer, reading and rereading. He was using plain notebook paper, but how long would his supply last?

And did anyone think the flu could last three weeks?

Once the waitress was satisfied that nothing was wrong, she set off with their order. Okuma glared some more, then glared at the table his classmates were sitting at.

“You could go say hi,” Kaoru suggested, lingering on **Do you not believe me? How stupid are you?**

“That’d just be awkward,” Okuma protested.

“More or less awkward than when I did it?”

“One of them’s my friend and I’ve been ditching him and his study sessions to stalk Oda’s apartment. You tell me.”

“About the same, then,” Kaoru decided. For Okuma’s sake he let it drop; he’d never had friends in middle school he wanted to keep secrets from, and this was going to be dangerous, probably. Shinya’s mom was no joke, even if she acted like one sometimes. “So, what’s the plan? If we keep staking out the apartment he’s going to miss exams.”

“His mom took his bag. That thing had everything in it: keys, phone, ID…” Okuma fiddled with a piece of hair. “If we could track his phone… if his mom keeps it on her… but there’s no way she is. Why would she need to?”

To check how many times Kaoru called in a day. To prove how maniacal he was to some future court of law, when he and Okuma were finally arrested for stalking her. And all because he cared, and was worried, and couldn’t stop hearing, _I hate her. I hate her._

 _I hate her, too,_ Kaoru thought. Not for the first time, either. This wasn’t the first time Shinya was upset to tears by her actions, but it was the first time they hadn’t been able to talk each other through it. Even his hospital stay hadn’t been this bad.

(His hospital stay where he’d convinced Shinya to start carrying a bag with all of his non-school-related things in it, because watching him fumble around his textbooks for the get-well-soon card was only funny for the first five minutes. Shinya had dumped his schoolbag out on Kaoru’s food tray and then they’d found it, and the embarrassment did the rest.)

It was strange, how nearly everything Shinya had told him echoed in his head at times like these. This never happened with Emi or Dad.

(Because he didn’t have to worry about them so much. Emi had family who knew her habits better than she did; they would take care of her. Dad was Dad; he could take care of himself, most of the time.)

“Maybe because it’s a piece of him she can control,” Kaoru guessed. “But I can’t see her carrying it around with her, actually. It would get too confusing, keeping them straight just to use her pass.”

If she boarded a train to get to her job at all. If the stops she used weren’t outside of Shinya’s student pass.

 **I wish you’d stop** , he read. _Bullshit_ , Kaoru thought. Their tea came; Okuma glared daggers at his as Kaoru took a drink. Just a touch too sweet. It was all the fruit.

Shinya could help, but he probably didn’t know. He and Okuma weren’t tech-savvy enough to track a phone. Kaoru wasn’t even sure if it was legal.

Who was he kidding? The longer Shinya was locked in that apartment, the more Kaoru wanted to bust the door down and drag him out. Maybe they could rent a grappling hook; Shinya could rappel down…

And then they’d do what, exactly? Run away? Hide Shinya in the Iwai family apartment, the one place the police would search first?

“Dude, I know _I_ don’t like the tea, but what did it do to you?”

“Nothing,” Kaoru said, folding up Shinya’s note and tucking it into one of his books. “I was just thinking, even if we do manage to get him out of there, where could he go?”

“Beats me,” Okuma said. “I only talked to him for a day or two, max. _You’re_ his friend. _You’re_ the one who calls him by name. He’d probably glare at me if I tried to do that.”

“Probably.” Out of embarrassment, anyway. Hate and anger were practically his go-to emotions. He’d probably learned it from his mom.

“Who’d glare?” someone asked. Okuma paled; Kaoru turned in his seat to find one of the classmates standing by their table. Hair spiked from one too many passes with a sweaty hand and eyes leery, sizing Kaoru up like some of Dad’s old yakuza friends.

(They visited the shop from time to time, and it was even rarer for Kaoru to be there at the same time, but every single one of them remembered him. It had been years, and yet he’d been the reason Munehisa Iwai left his clan. They’d never forget.)

“Oda,” Okuma grumbled, pushing his cup around.

“Oda?” the classmate asked. He turned to Kaoru. “You’re Oda’s friend?”

“The one and only, it seems,” Kaoru said.

“Huh,” the guy said, dragging a hand through his hair. His bangs, which had been threatening to fall into his eyes, stuck straight up with renewed vigor. “And you’re here, Ryo, because…?”

Okuma, rather than answer, took a sip of his drink. He gagged on the taste.

Kaoru said, “He’s been taking Shinya his homework and printouts and such. We just happened to run into each other.”

“So you’re sitting together in a diner two stops away from his place, because…?”

Okuma set his cup down with such a loud clack that Kaoru feared he broke the saucer. “And you know where his place is?”

“The teacher mentioned it,” the guy said. “So? How come?”

“Don’t be so pushy,” Okuma scowled. “Don’t you have studying to do? Can’t this wait?”

The guy crossed his arms. “It can’t, actually, since you’ve been avoiding me for a month. First you get all buddy-buddy with Oda, and now you’re meeting his friends in secret? What’s going on?”

“It’s none of your business. I can talk to who I want without you around, you know!”

“Um,” Kaoru said, but went ignored.

“You can, fine, I just want to know why you’ve been avoiding me! What’s so great about Oda that you’ll talk to him and his friends but not _me_?”

“Oda doesn’t chase me all across town, okay?” Okuma snarled. “He doesn’t follow me to my house, ask my parents if something’s wrong, and then leave, like he’s satisfied or late to cram school. Oda doesn’t give two shits what I have to tell him, and he won’t run off and run his mouth, either!”

“Should—should I go?” Kaoru tried to ask, but went ignored. Again.

“You mean there are things you’ll tell a complete stranger, but not your best friend?” the guy asked, leaning over the table to get in Okuma’s face. Okuma met his glare with a frown so fierce it would have given Shinya’s a run for its money.

“Excuse me,” the waitress said, having rushed over the moment Okuma first raised his voice. “You’re disturbing the other customers. If you can’t lower your voices, I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to leave.”

Okuma, who’d been raring to go with another rejoinder along the lines of _just shut up and leave me alone_ , snapped his mouth shut. He scowled at his too-sweet tea as his—classmate? Friend? _Best_ friend?—apologized to the waitress. She looked on in disbelief, glancing between the guy’s sweat-soaked hair and red face and Okuma’s embarrassed lack of eye contact, before relenting: if it happened again, they’d be gone, no questions asked.

“Right,” the guy agreed. He and Kaoru watched her go, met her gaze as she looked over her shoulder to see if they were keeping their end of the bargain or not. The guy sighed.

Kaoru glanced to Okuma—still staring into the depths of his cup, as if rose hips and lemon seeds had any way of getting him out of this—and said, “Why don’t you sit down? You can talk through this. Probably.”

“‘Probably,’ says Oda’s mystery friend,” the guy grumbled, but sat when Kaoru made room. For all his bluster standing over the table, now that he was sitting at it, he seemed almost shy. Probably embarrassed, too, to have made such a fuss in a diner.

Kaoru let them sit and stew for a few minutes, thinking over Shinya’s latest note. None of this was good. Shinya needed to get out of that apartment, but without a key, how would they get in? Say that they were worried about his well-being and pray that the landlady would let them in? Hope that Ms. Oda hadn’t told her not to?

The longer he sat in there, the worse he would get. How much longer would it be until Shinya wound up in the hospital? Would Ms. Oda even let some well-meaning strangers take care of her son?

Absolutely not. She would never. Someone would have to rip him from her cold, dead hands first, and Kaoru wasn’t about to even consider murder.

But… “Say,” he said to Okuma’s friend, “you, uh, wouldn’t happen to know anyone who can track phones or pick locks, do you?”

“Dude, what the fuck,” Okuma said.

“… Does this have to do with Oda?” the guy asked, not nearly as hesitant as Kaoru would have been at that age. “With, uh, why he hasn’t been coming to school?”

Okuma stiffened for a split second—why, Kaoru thought, when it was so obvious Ms. Oda’s lies were just that, _lies_ —before relaxing. He took another sip of his tea and grimaced this time as it went down. “His mom said he’s sick,” Okuma said, weakly.

“Bullshit,” the guy said. “If we asked, what would his mom say about the cuts on his ears?”

“That she’s not a very good hairdresser,” Kaoru guessed.

Okuma snorted. The guy grunted.

Good, Kaoru thought. At least they all knew it was bullshit.

The guy leaned back in his seat, thinking. “It makes more sense than him having the flu this long,” he muttered to himself, “but I can’t say I know anybody who knows either. That crap’s illegal. No way would a middle school student know how to—”

“Um!” squeaked a redhead girl, from where she crouched on the floor by Okuma’s seat like some kind of goblin, the thick frames of her glasses barely poking over the table’s edge. “Um, I-I can—can track. Phones. And, uh, stuff.”

Okuma, to his credit, didn’t jump. He’d probably seen her sidle up and didn’t say anything. His friend did, though, banging a knee against the table. The girl stared on, pulling herself slowly into the seat. “Sorry,” she said, once more than half her face was showing. “I was going to the bathroom and I overheard and—and I can track, um, phones and stuff. If you need it.”

“We do need it,” Okuma remarked. “Actually, it’d be easier to track his mom’s phone, if she’s using it to get on the subway… But what’s his mom’s number? The teachers would know, but it’s not like they’ll give it to us.”

“You don’t even want to know why?” Kaoru asked the girl.

“I can guess,” she said. “You guys’ve been over here yelling about some kid for the past ten minutes or so. I can put two and two together.”

Perfect. Now half the diner knew they were planning a break-in. Great.

A woman with a bob-cut was leaning out from her table, mouthing something. The girl grimaced, fished around for napkin, and pulled a nub of a pencil out of her pocket. “This is my LINE ID,” she said. “When you know what number you want tracked, just let me know.”

She sulked off, hands shoved into her hoodie pockets, pulling the hood up as she rejoined—her mother, Kaoru guessed. The woman was old enough, and there was kind of a resemblance, though the woman was confident where her daughter wasn’t.

Okuma pushed the napkin over to Kaoru, and for a moment they all looked at the nearly-illegible scrawl that might have spelled out a name.

Kaoru pulled it closer, pulled his phone out, and asked, “You don’t want it?”

“Hell no,” Okuma said. “This is _your_ illegal activity, dude. I don’t like Oda that much.”

“Could have fooled me,” his friend grumbled.

“God, am I not allowed to have other friends, Shu? Is that it?”

“It’s Oda,” was the hissed response. “ _Oda_ , remember? He was gambling in his first year? Half our grade hates him? How’d you two even start talking to each other, anyway?”

Okuma looked to Kaoru. Kaoru shrugged; this wasn’t his fight, and it wasn’t his fight to break up, but answered, “You’d be surprised. Teachers, gym class, phone games… There’s more to Shinya than gambling and Gun About. I—”

Hadn’t seen him touch a controller since that first year. Shinya never wanted to go to the arcade and stopped talking about it entirely unless it was to say that it was too kiddish to stay with it for so long, and that might have been Kaoru’s fault. Gun About had been the only thing he was good at back then; Gun About had been the only thing he cared about back then, and Kaoru had teased him for it, and then he’d gotten kidnapped, and some yakuza thug had pointed a real, live gun at Shinya.

And Shinya, knowing exactly what could happen, had probably sworn off them for the rest of his life. Kaoru, who’d been too blinded by Dad’s newfound trust in him, hadn’t noticed.

“Well, people change,” Kaoru finished. “It could be he’s too embarrassed by what he was doing to talk to anyone. I think he knows that once you’ve got a bad rep, it’s hard to shake off.”

Okuma’s friend eyed him as he spoke. Okuma himself nodded along. “Yeah,” he agreed, “once you get past all that pissed-off bluster he’s got, he’s not that bad a guy. Better than Higuchi, that’s for sure.”

“Higuchi?” his friend asked. “What’s wrong with him?”

Okuma flushed. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s just—”

“Opinionated?” Kaoru guessed. “Can’t stand to be wrong about anything, ever?”

“Yeah,” Okuma muttered, and finished off his tea. He grimaced again at the taste, or at the memory of Higuchi—Kaoru met plenty of guys like him back in cram school, ‘natural-born leaders’ with their heads up their asses whose minds could never be swayed from any line of thinking, at all—and added, “Once he gets going, it’s his way or the highway. I didn’t mind it so much before, but now he’s all—”

He broke off to gesture. Kaoru assumed it was an explosion of some kind; Okuma’s friend nodded along.

“—like we haven’t been trying to think for ourselves, or now that we are, he hates it. _I_ hate it. I don’t know if I can keep being his friend like this.”

“Then don’t,” his friend said. “What can he do? Call you names for it?”

“Even names can hurt,” Kaoru reminded him, checking the time. “And I should get going. I’m on dinner duty tonight; gotta hit the supermarket before the sales end.”

He paid, the taste of the Fruitea lingering on the back of his tongue, all the things he couldn’t and shouldn’t say weighing it down into silence. Shinya was the only one who understood everything about him and didn’t care. Shinya was the only one who’d never look at him differently; not even Emi knew about Dad’s sordid past, and if she ever found out…

He shuddered from more than the cold and the dripping slush being pushed around by the wind. If Emi ever found out, would she leave him? Would she say that was too much to handle and find someone else?

Was Shinya really the only person who would stay by his side, despite everything?

Kakao: **I know we just met and all, and I didn’t even get your name, but mind if I ask you something?**

Alibaba: **mr. good grammar over here can ask whatever he wants!! shoot!**

Kakao: **If someone you just met got kidnapped by the yakuza, what would you do?**

Alibaba: **starting off w the hard stuff, huh—or so you think, cause im helping you, right? its not that hard. you just gotta commit to it and follow through** **but most people cant do that**

Alibaba: **why? that kid you mentioned get kidnapped? cause thatll be trickier than i thought**

Kakao: **He’s fine. I don’t think he’s going to go anywhere anytime soon. I just wanted to ask, that’s all.**

Because Shinya had sat there in Kaoru’s apartment, afraid for all of their lives. Because Shinya hadn’t left him after. Because Shinya had called for help from the one person who could give it.

Because Shinya hadn’t left him after. Shinya had kept coming back, over and over again, and now that he wasn’t, Kaoru didn’t know what to do with himself except seek him out. He could be studying; he could be spending time with Emi; he could be doing anything else, and yet here he was, planning a crime.

Alibaba: **hey no prob you let me know about that number, got it?**

“Yeah,” Kaoru promised her. Freezing rain soaked into his shoes; it did nothing to stop him from taking the long way to the supermarket, hoping the air would calm him down.

It didn’t. Shinya was the only friend he had who knew everything, and Kaoru was standing around, comparing the prices of eggs. Shinya _was_ everything, at this point. Kaoru would fight the yakuza for him.

So what did it mean, that he didn’t think he’d do the same for Emi?

* * *

By the time Okuma whittled down his homeroom teacher’s patience and got Ms. Oda’s number, Emi was cornering Kaoru daily. She wanted to know how Shinya was doing, she said. She was worried, too, she said. His exams were next week, she said.

“I found someone who can pick locks,” Okuma said one day as he passed Shinya’s newest notes along. “We’ll have to pay him. He didn’t say how much. He asked when we could do it, but I didn’t know.”

“Does he seem too eager to do this?” Kaoru asked.

“More concerned with how illegal it is, okay,” Okuma said, sipping his soda. “He doesn’t want anyone to see, and he doesn’t want anyone reporting him to the police. If we get caught, this’ll be bad for all of us, much less Oda.”

Well, at least he wasn’t out to steal all of Ms. Oda’s valuables. Kaoru would have to keep an eye on him, just in case.

And the grinning, mousy-haired young man he traded bows with a few days later definitely didn’t seem trustworthy. Not one bit. He chuckled to himself a lot, gaze roving between the dangling earrings on a passing woman to the gold chains of some gangster-wannabe swaggering along with his posse.

“Normally I wouldn’t do stuff like this,” he said with another chuckle, “but getting to use my skillset to help someone? That’ll be new.”

“Just… be quiet, please,” Kaoru told him, and he grinned and nodded, like this was all a game. Okuma, standing by in the same uniform, shrugged helplessly. His friend Sakurazawa, arms crossed and face soured, tapped at his arm with a finger.

“Yo,” Alibaba said in his ear. “You’re all set. She’ll be at work for another hour or two, I hear. I’ll keep track of her, just in case.”

“Thanks,” he told her. Then, to the group: “We’re good. Let’s go.”

They set off down the street, Okuma and Sakurazawa in front, and Kaoru and the lockpicker a few paces behind. The silence between the two friends was thick with tension, and Kaoru’s heart sank. It hurt, watching friends fight.

(It hurt, watching Shinya try to keep them all away. It hurt, keeping this a secret from Emi and Dad.)

They huddled around the door, the lockpicker with his tools out, Okuma with his manila folder of handouts at the ready, Kaoru and Sakurazawa on the lookout for anyone coming down the hall. Alibaba squeaked in Kaoru’s ear.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Later!” she said. “I’ll tell you later!”

She went silent. The click and scrape of the lockpicker’s tools, drowned out by passing traffic, felt far more insidious than Kaoru had first thought.

They were really doing this. They really were breaking into an apartment.

Good God.

“What’d she say?” Okuma asked, softly.

“Something startled her, that’s all.”

“Huh,” he said, and Sakurazawa bristled beside him. Kaoru shifted to block the lockpicker as a door down the hall swung shut with a heavy thump, but for all their time standing there, no one came by.

“There,” the lockpicker said, pulling the door open. “You guys’re lucky. If it was a newer one, there woulda been no way I’d pull this off.”

He took his tools out of the lock and strode inside the apartment as if he owned it; the other three were quick to follow behind, and Kaoru shut the door behind him. It wasn’t a vastly different apartment from before: the same beige couch, the same dusty TV, the same scuffed dining table covered in manila folders, each of them unopened, the pile nearly spilling onto the floor. Okuma tossed his on top.

The lockpicker took a seat on the couch and made a big show of stretching. Sakurazawa stood in the middle of the room, still tapping away at his arm; Okuma brushed his bangs out of his face and said, “So, uh, which room’s Oda’s?”

The one in the back, Kaoru knew. The only one whose door was shut, he saw; Ms. Oda’s door was cracked open just a bit, and he could see the edge of a dresser in the gloom. He pushed past it, despite the urge to throw the door wide open, some paranoid part of him screaming that Alibaba had lied and Ms. Oda was lurking on the other side.

Shinya was all that mattered. Shinya was who they were here for.

Kaoru knocked on his door. “Shinya?” Kaoru called. “Are you there?”

He could hear the sneer in Okuma’s voice as he said, “Of course he’s there, where else would he be?”

“Kaoru?” came Shinya’s voice, muffled and weak and disbelieving. It swiftly turned to anger. “What are you doing here? I told you not to come! If my mom sees you—”

“She’s not here,” he said, unclenching his hand. Shinya was right there, on the other side of the door. It had been weeks since Kaoru had seen him. “We, uh, sneaked in. I guess.”

Shinya was silent, but Kaoru could see him pacing the room, tearing at his hair and swearing under his breath at the ceiling. Behind him, Okuma said, “God damn it, Morita, get off the couch. And don’t touch anything!”

Morita—the lockpick, Kaoru guessed—groaned out, “Fine.”

“Shinya, listen,” Kaoru said. “You can’t be safe here. There’s no way I can believe you are”—and he wasn’t, there was a damn deadbolt on this side of the door, in addition to the lock—“but—but if you don’t want to come with us, you don’t have to. I’ll unlock it, and I’ll wait with everyone out here. We’ll give you five minutes, okay?”

Shinya grumbled something unintelligible. Kaoru shoved his hands in his pockets, clenched them so hard he could feel the blood loss, and shut his eyes.

Shinya was right there. He was _right there_ , and Kaoru couldn’t hold him.

 _Have I ever felt like this with Emi?_ he thought, more than a little concerned by the pressing need growing in his hands to wrench the door open and drag Shinya out of there bodily, whether he wanted to go or not.

But that would make him no better than Ms. Oda, forcing her way of thinking on him. Shinya had to decide himself. Shinya had to open the door himself.

So he unlocked the door and undid the deadbolt and then fled down the hall, all three steps of it. It felt like three miles; every fiber of his being screamed at him to turn back, to watch and wait, but he feared if he did he would lose Shinya to the dark of that closed room forever.

And that was somehow worse than not being able to touch him the moment they were in the apartment. Okuma, who was scowling at Morita for staring at the photographs on the wall, turned his head and got out, “Whoa, who died—”

He broke off with a squawk as Kaoru trapped him in a crushing hug, the kind that Shinya would hate to get, that caused even his bones to creak in complaint.

Morita laughed—at the sight, at the face Okuma was making, at the tears beginning to drip down Kaoru’s face—and then stopped, just as abruptly.

“Uh,” Okuma said, bringing his arms up to hug back. It wasn’t nearly as tight as Kaoru’s, but Kaoru felt no need to let up. “Look, I’m sure he’s fine. And he’s gonna be fine from now on, too, so—uh, you don’t have to get upset about it.”

Sakurazawa, from somewhere behind Kaoru, said, “I’d be upset if this happened to any of my friends. It’s not right. You know it’s not, Ryo.”

“Shut up, Shu,” Okuma hissed, causing Morita to giggle. “All I’m saying is that he’s fine. And he’s not even outta the building yet, so we don’t have any time to waste puttering about being all happy when we just got in.”

“We don’t know he’s fine,” Kaoru said, in a voice that refused to be anything louder than a whisper. “We don’t know that. It’s been weeks. She could have done anything—she could have—”

He stopped short, trying not to think. Shinya had sounded fine from the other side of the door, but—if that had been a lie—if he had just been placating them after they came all this way—

His heart lurched; his grip tightened. Okuma whined and tapped, without effect, at his back. “Hey, come on,” Okuma said, though his voice was strained, “he’s fine. He’s a tough guy, Oda. It would take more than a shaky hand with some scissors to scare him off.”

“Maybe if she shaved him bald—” Morita cut in, but was stopped by Okuma hissing at him to _shut up, damn it_.

“The point is that he’s okay, and he’s going to _be_ okay, because he’s going to come with us, okay?” Okuma finished. “He’s going to come with us, and we’re going to Big Bang to celebrate, and we’ll make sure he’s eats until he’s fit to burst, okay?”

All that greasy junk food, after weeks and weeks of—god, Kaoru hoped not—starvation? “He’ll get sick,” Kaoru said.

“I never said it had to be today!”

“What has to be today?” Shinya’s voice came.

“Nothing,” Okuma said. He tried to pry Kaoru off him, but Kaoru’s hands weren’t working. He couldn’t seem to let go. “Just, uh—a party. For breaking you out of here. You do want to go, right?”

Kaoru met Morita’s gaze over Okuma’s shoulder. He grinned, mimed zipping his lips, and turned to the genkan, where their shoes were in a haphazard pile. Kaoru was glad he hadn’t worn his sneakers for this; he wasn’t sure he would be able to tie them.

A hand met his shoulder. Sakurazawa joined Morita in sorting out the shoes, a familiar bag thrown over his shoulder, but kept glancing back; Shinya’s hand—Shinya, in the flesh, with his _hand_ —traveled down Kaoru’s arm and pulled.

Just like that, Kaoru couldn’t find it in himself to keep holding on. Okuma wiggled out of his grip, tripped over backwards in his haste to get to the genkan, and only dared to look back as he was pulling his shoes on.

This was a dream, Kaoru decided. After weeks of not being able to see him, for Shinya to just… be there, now, of all times? Holding his hand like he hadn’t told Kaoru not to on Christmas Eve? Saying, “Kaoru?” like it didn’t send a javelin straight through Kaoru’s heart?

“Did you pack what you needed?” Kaoru asked, suddenly very sure that if he turned around, Shinya would disappear, or turn out to be a pile of bones threaded together with string, or something equally horrifying. If he turned around, Shinya would simply cease to be, and he would be left alone again, bereft even of the feeling of touching his hand.

Warm. Soft. Kaoru couldn’t help but run his thumb over every inch it could reach.

Shinya let him. “Yeah,” he said. “But, my mom—”

“She’s still at work,” Kaoru told him, and swallowed through a dry throat and the lump that had sprouted in it. “We should—we should go.”

And Shinya followed, meek as a kitten. They stopped only to lock the apartment door with Shinya’s key and to buy him a train ticket, and he said next to nothing. Even when Morita split off from the group with a bemused farewell, he said nothing.

Kaoru couldn’t look at him, not even on the train, not even in the reflections in the windows. Instead he listened to Okuma babble on about potential hiding places, how Shinya clearly couldn’t go to Kaoru’s place—it would be the first place Ms. Oda would insist be checked, after all—or to Okuma’s—there was no way his parents would allow him to let a friend stay over indefinitely—which left, where?

Alibaba, listening in through the phone still left running in Kaoru’s pocket, snickered. “I’ve got a place,” she said.

* * *

Alibaba’s hiding place was an old cafe in the middle of a maze of backstreets and alleys. The bell on the door jingled as they entered; the older man at the counter raised a single quizzical eyebrow but directed them up the stairs in the back to a spacious attic.

The redhead girl from the cafe snapped her laptop shut. “’lo,” she mumbled, rubbing at her tired eyes.

The black-haired woman at the other side of the table sighed. “Is this is how you greet guests, Futaba?”

“Mom!” the redhead whined, then turned to the group. “So, uh, yeah. This’s it. It’s not the best, but if you’re up here we can just tell the cops you broke in to squat or something.”

Okuma and Sakurazawa had gravitated to the heater in the corner. Shinya asked, “Are you sure? There’s nothing in it for you.”

“Well, I can think of something,” the redhead said, staring down at her laptop. “But—but only if you decide to stay! Sojiro’ll even say you’re part-timing if you help out downstairs!”

Her mother chuckled. “Calm down, Futaba. Why don’t we let them think it over over some dinner, hm? I’m sure they’re hungry.”

“Ooh, me too,” Futaba muttered, practically drooling, and now Kaoru could smell the coffee beans all around them. The scent of curry spices seemed to have soaked into the very floorboards of the place. His stomach rumbled.

Shinya’s did, too. Futaba’s mother chuckled again, and after Futaba set her laptop aside, they headed downstairs. The boys waited until the clatter of dishes sounded up the stairs to so much as move. Sakurazawa and Okuma shared a glance; Sakurazawa said, “We’ll just, uh, wait downstairs,” and tugged Okuma along behind him.

Okuma pleaded for help with his eyes. Kaoru was too focused on the hand on his to do much about it.

The stairs complained loudly, and then it was just Kaoru and Shinya, in an unfamiliar cafe attic, holding each other’s hands for the first time in weeks. It felt like months; it felt like years.

“Kaoru?” Shinya asked.

“Uh?” Kaoru said, his throat refusing to work. He cleared it. “Yeah?”

“Why won’t you look at me?”

“Because,” Kaoru said, feeling foolish, “if I’m dreaming, I don’t want to wake up. It’s been weeks. This doesn’t feel real.”

“It’s only been a couple weeks.” Shinya pressed his head into Kaoru’s back. “Imagine how bad it’s been for me, stuck in my room all that time. Nobody to talk to at all. I kept throwing paper out the window hoping somebody would come by and help, but no one did.”

“But you told us to stop going.”

“Because she could hurt you!” Shinya hissed. “Because she _can_ hurt you! I don’t want your future to be messed up because of me! You don’t deserve it!”

His hands still ached to hold him. Kaoru braced himself and turned: Shinya, with days of bedhead matting his hair and dark circles under his eyes and his lip bitten through so many times it had scabbed over. His cheeks were a little thinner. His collarbone was more prominent. “So you deserve to stay locked up forever? Is that what you mean?”

“She wanted me to stop being friends with you,” Shinya said, staring at a button on Kaoru’s shirt. “I told you, she broke in when I was sleeping. I don’t know what I said, but she didn’t like it, and then it was her way or no way.” He looked away, to the bags of coffee beans sitting on a shelf by the stairs. “I didn’t deserve it, but I thought—the school would do something. Mr. Mori would do something. Somebody would come and then I wouldn’t have to—to lose to her. Prim fought and won; why couldn’t I do it, too?”

Prim hadn’t been alone. But Shinya had been fighting, all by his lonesome, for years.

And all he wanted was to be heard, to be seen, to be treated like a person instead of a thing his mom had to keep under lock and key.

And—Prim had fought and won because Shinya had wanted it, because he couldn’t fight and win himself. Prim’s victory was as good as his own, except for her death.

Kaoru, out of words to say, just pulled him into a hug. It wasn’t nearly as crushing as the one Okuma got; Kaoru could feel how thin Shinya had gotten through his layers, could feel him shaking like a leaf in the lukewarm heat of the attic. Angry tears soaked his coat.

He didn’t care. Shinya was right here, in his arms, where he belonged.

 _Something must be wrong with me_ , he thought as Shinya cried. It felt more right to hold Shinya than it did to hold Emi. He liked her hugs, he liked holding her hand—but he didn’t think anything she did would ever feel as right as this did. Nothing would ever feel as right as this did.

But… did that make it wrong? Why did he keep thinking something had to be wrong? Why couldn’t he love them both in different ways, in different measures?

He wouldn’t dwell on it now. All that mattered was that Shinya was here, safe and sound.

Kaoru wouldn’t trade that for the world.


	4. The Confession, Part Three

Kaoru fell asleep as soon as his curry was finished. It was a testament to how large his worry had grown, Shinya thought; Kaoru had always been sure to stay awake for a few hours after every meal, and all because of some study about stomach acid. Shinya wasn’t sure how that worked, and Shinya didn’t care; he left Kaoru to snooze and took their plates downstairs, where the owner and Okuma and Sakurazawa were waiting.

Okuma… didn’t quite look as glad to see him as Shinya thought he would. But neither had Kaoru, so it was a moot point to obsess over; he did the dishes as he wondered how long it would take them to process it fully. A week? Two?

What was he supposed to do in the meantime? Sit around in a different prison he couldn’t leave until the adults told him it was okay?

(Well, he was fine with that. Anything other than his room.)

Sakurazawa banged his way out of the cafe, nearly slamming the door open. The owner shook his head at the act, told Okuma, “He’ll get over it or he won’t, kid,” and went back to his puzzle book.

Shinya took Sakurazawa’s vacant seat and said, “I didn’t thank you yet.”

“You don’t have to,” came Okuma’s voice, though he was more interested in the wood grain of the table than in Shinya. “You helped me out, too. And that guy upstairs would’ve charged in without a second’s thought if he thought you were in real danger. He’s the one who dragged us all together.”

Kaoru had told a slightly different story from that over their curry, but Shinya wasn’t going to press. Let everybody downplay their roles as much as they wanted; even Sakurazawa had contributed by finding Shinya’s bag in the depths of his mom’s room.

It was more than he thought they’d do. He was a troublemaker; they were better off not bothering him.

“I, um.” Okuma couldn’t seem to talk any louder than the TV in the corner. Shinya had to strain to hear him. “I told him. Uh, what I told you. About my boyfriend, and Higuchi and all that.”

“And he’s pissed off you hid it from him?” Shinya guessed.

“Yeah,” he said. “He promised he wouldn’t tell anybody, but… I dunno. He might. I might be that fag in high school all the guys have to watch out for, soon.”

It was then that Shinya realized there wasn’t any product in his hair. His bangs seemed to float; all the flyaway hair that was normally pushed down and molded into place was free, and he looked… normal. Less tryhard, as if he’d been cultivating some image of himself that fell apart as soon as he had something better to worry about.

Or maybe it was simply that the fight he’d been having with Sakurazawa had kept him from sleeping, which kept him from having time to do his hair in the mornings. It was a toss-up.

“So?” Shinya asked.

“Uh, I’d rather not be pushed around the locker room just for liking guys, Oda,” Okuma said, rolling his eyes and finally raising his gaze from the table. “Like, if any of them were my type I’d get it, but they’ll be high school boys, which means they won’t have two brain cells to rub together.”

“And we will?”

Okuma opened his mouth to say something, then stopped. He laughed, a short snort—and tossed his bangs out of his face. “Of course _we_ will. You and me, Oda, we’ll have _class_. You think we’re going to horndog it up every damn day? Nuh-uh. I have standards.”

“Uh,” Shinya said.

“All I’m gonna hope for is one guy—just one!—who’s halfway decent. Somebody who doesn’t make me wait outside the theater until the previews are over before he tells me he’s not showing, _again_. Is that too much to ask? Shu would never do that to me, so why should I stand a boyfriend who does?”

“I, uh,” Shinya tried to say, “I think I’m missing something here—”

“And I get that you’re all over Mr. Polo upstairs, but he’s in college, right? You should branch out a little. Make some new friends. I’m not gonna complain, no sir.”

“Slow down a bit, kid,” the owner admonished, and Okuma jumped in his seat.

“Sorry,” he said, staring at the table again.

It was all Shinya could do not to laugh—or get pissed off instead. How had he gone through life while being so damn easy to read? “I never told you about Kaoru,” Shinya said.

Okuma stared at him. “Uh, you held hands with him all the way here, Oda.”

“That’s just what he does!” After the hug in Shinya’s apartment, how could he not get that?

Okuma made a strangled noise. “Yeah, I know,” he agreed, but prattled on. “But you didn’t look all that opposed to it. I don’t know if it’s a one-sided thing or what, but—”

“I _told_ him to stop doing it!”

Okuma grinned, resting his head on a hand. “So it _is_ a one-sided thing, huh?”

“Shut up.” Shinya kicked him under the table. He winced, but grinned even harder—and all three of them looked at the stairs when a thump resounded from the attic; Kaoru stumbled down a moment later, still half-asleep. He paused long enough to squint around the cafe, locate Shinya, and rush over.

Shinya endured his too-tight, incredibly awkward hug and glared as Okuma’s shoulders began to shake with laughter.

“It’s not funny,” Shinya declared, even though Kaoru’s glasses were pressing into his temple.

“I know,” Okuma said through bursts of laughter. “I just—geez, I wish I had friends who’d—who’d get so worried about _me_ they’d do that.”

“Then make some.”

Kaoru made a noise—Shinya decided that there was no way it was a groan of any kind, not from Kaoru, not when his face was smashed into his own—one that came from low in his throat, and that seemed to protest the noise. Shinya tried to shove him away. “Go _home_ ,” he said as Kaoru continued to cling to him like a burr.

He’d only been gone two weeks. Two weeks which Kaoru spent worrying—judging from the amount of texts and missed calls on his phone—without so much as a whisper to assuage his doubt and fears. Without so much as a phone call from Shinya’s mom to help him feel even a tiny bit better.

(She had to have known he was worried. She’d had Shinya’s phone the whole time. How could she not see what was so damn obvious? Was she really so willfully blind to it all?)

If… if Kaoru had never come back that night, what would Shinya have done? Continue to sit there like a lump, waiting and waiting for the only person he’d called a friend? Would he have dared to leave the room, the apartment?

… Would he have ever regained the strength to go back to Prim?

He groaned—at the weight of his thoughts, at Kaoru’s weight trying to crush him into the booth seat—and shoved harder. This time Kaoru backed off, and the owner, now safely behind the bar, gave a wry smile at the sight.

“Go home,” Shinya ordered as Kaoru blinked and stared at his empty hands. “Go. Take a bath, do some studying. I’ll be fine, so worry about yourself.”

“But—” Kaoru croaked, throat still choked with sleep.

“But?” Shinya challenged.

There, again: that deep in the throat noise that sounded like a complaint. Grunting and groaning just didn’t do it justice. Not with Kaoru.

“I’m sure you’re worried about him,” the owner said, throwing a dishrag over his shoulder and rejoining them on the cafe floor, “but, as far as I understand it, this little shop of mine won’t be on any of the police’s radars. His mother has no reason to storm in here looking for him, and I’ve got a pretty decent surveillance system”—

(Futaba, a block down the street enjoying gyudon with her mom, sneezed. The headphones connected to her phone drizzled static and voices, and though Wakaba usually didn’t like electronics at the table, she’d agreed to overlook it. Just this once.)

—“so I’ll know if anyone breaks in. I won’t turn him over if the cops show up, and I won’t let them take him if he doesn’t want to go. Understand?”

That all sounded fair enough to Shinya, but Kaoru frowned at the speech. “He has school. Exams are coming up. He can’t just—just keep missing class. He can’t just not go to his entrance exams.”

“We’ll figure that out,” assured the owner, “but for now, go on home. Give yourself a night to realize he’s out of that place; give him some space to realize it, too. Then you can come back tomorrow. I’m always open.”

Kaoru shook his head. “But—” he started to say again, but stopped. He sighed. “Alright, fine. As long as he calls me in the morning.”

“He will,” the owner said. “I’ll be sure to remind him. Now get going.”

He refused payment for the food and ushered Okuma and Kaoru out the door. Both of them paused in the threshold, looking back before venturing out onto the street: Okuma with a shit-eating grin, Kaoru with another worried look.

Then they were gone.

“So,” the owner said, wiping down the table. “What about you? Anything you need to take care of?”

“I don’t know,” Shinya said. He looked around the cafe: dim lighting and worn seats; a cluttered back alley through the window; jars and jars of coffee beans lining the wall behind the bar.

“Too sudden?”

“Yeah.” Though he’d been prepped for it for a while, wishing that one night his mom would forget to lock the door. He’d never realized she’d added a deadbolt to the mix; he was lucky that she hadn’t added any more.

“I didn’t expect anybody to help me,” he admitted. “And you—you’re just a stranger. What do you get out of this? You can’t be doing it just to be nosy.”

The owner sighed, scratching the back of his head. “I’m just doing it to help. You aren’t the first person to come here without any other place to go, and I’ve got a feeling you won’t be the last, either. It’s… well, there are a lot of kids out there who need help. If my shop’s attic can be some help to one of them, then that’s good enough for me.”

“Good enough, huh,” Shinya muttered. He took the water bottle the owner set down and sipped at it, thinking as the man closed up his shop: there were people other than Kaoru and his dad and Mr. Mori who wanted to help him. The adults had their hands tied by the law—Shinya didn’t fault them for that—but for his own classmates to crawl out of the woodwork on his behalf? After all the years he’d spent being the class loner? After all the whispered conversations about how he was a troublemaker?

He couldn’t say he got it.

As he got ready for bed, he thought some more: could he consider Okuma and Sakurazawa his friends, now? Did he have to? Okuma, at least, seemed determined to be, and if it wasn’t for how easily he rambled, Shinya might not care—

He grunted at his reflection, wiping toothpaste off his chin. He was pissed that he was so easy to read, and he was pissed that someone had the weird idea that Kaoru liked him back. Kaoru had a girlfriend. He wasn’t going to like a boy like Shinya; Shinya had all the wrong parts.

“Stop thinking so much,” he told himself, standing in the attic—now freezing—and contemplating dragging the heater closer to the couch. If he wasn’t worried that the old thing would burst into flames at a second’s notice, he might have; if there weren’t piles and piles of blankets on the couch by the window, he really would have.

He unloaded them all onto the table, staring at the redhead’s laptop still on the workbench. Why was she helping? What was she getting out of it—

He shook his head, dug out his phone, and shot off a message to Kaoru.

The least Shinya could be was grateful.

* * *

Kaoru yawned; after he’d gone home last night he’d barely managed to sleep, even knowing that Shinya was safe in a place his mom would never think to look. Every time he’d nod off he’d have that dream again, where Shinya was missing, vanished like so much smoke into the air, and he’d jerk awake, heart pounding.

Emi set a can of coffee on the table, settling into the seat across from him. The campus cafe wasn’t very busy despite the hour; it was far too cold to be sitting around outside. “Is it really that bad?” she asked.

The can was hot in his hand. It was almost as hot as Shinya’s hand, his skin, the very, very fleeting heat of life. Kaoru pressed it to his face and sighed. “No, it’s just me,” he told her, reaching across the table and snagging her sleeve.

She was warm. Hot. All people were, he supposed, but her warmth left something cold and aching deep in the pit of his chest: something was missing. He thought he knew what.

“Do you think you’ll be okay for exams?”

Now that Shinya was okay, he’d be able to study. They could do their study groups over the phone; visiting the cafe too much would surely be seen as suspicious by any cops Shinya’s mom could convince to investigate.

He’d have to tell Okuma, too, although the kid might not listen at all.

But none of that meant he’d be able to focus. Now that he’d been able to hold him again, after what felt like years, Kaoru wasn’t sure how he’d continue on without the reassurance anymore. Shinya, warm and alive under his hands, even with his thin frame and his scarred ears and his angry worry.

“Probably,” he said. Shinya would be pissed if he failed his exams after this. He had no idea how much he needed to make up, how many extra hours a night at his desk he’d earned himself, but it was worth it.

“Probably?” she laughed. “I know your major isn’t that rare, but—”

“That’s no excuse not to study. I shouldn’t have skipped out so much. But, I—that’s not the only reason, really. I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For being so… indecisive about it. I could study literature at Kyodai; I could study it anywhere. You wanted to go so badly. But, I just…”

 _I don’t want to leave,_ he wanted to tell her. _I don’t want to leave Dad and Shinya and these familiar city streets. I don’t want to leave and then find out something’s happened._

“You know,” she said, “I think there’s a difference between being indecisive and being torn. It’s one thing if you can’t decide; it’s another if you don’t _want_ to. Which one are you?”

“I don’t…”

He trailed off, thinking again. Her alarm rung; Emi flounced off after they shared a kiss and he tucked the can of coffee away. Its heat was already dissipating, but his hands remembered.

All through his first lecture he thought. He had been faced with two paths, but he’d decided which one to follow long ago. Two years ago, in fact, when Shinya had cried in his arms. He’d known, then, that he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t ever leave. It was why he was going to some small-time college nearby instead of one farther away that was better, like Dad wanted.

And he loved Emi. But he didn’t love her enough to dream of university life together, living in the same rented apartment, going to the same classes, coming home every night after a part-time job to her.

There must have been something wrong with him after all. He loved her, but he didn’t really want her. He’d never really wanted her, just her companionship, just her friendship. Just her hand holding his as they walked down the street; just her kind smiles. They’d never had time for dates because he was preoccupied with Shinya. He didn’t know why she was still with him.

“Iwai,” came the professor’s sharp voice. “If you aren’t feeling well, go to the nurses’ office.”

Kaoru, tears streaming down his cheeks, one hand clasped to his mouth to stifle cries, complied.

Later, after he’d moped in bed for the rest of the day, the doorbell rang. Emi, through the peephole, pissed as he let her in.

Emi, sitting at his kitchen table, in the spot Shinya usually sat in, glowering at the tea he made her. “You should have told me you were sick.”

“Not sick.” He couldn’t look in her the eye. She’d never gotten angry at him before. “I just… was thinking about stuff. I couldn’t explain it, so the nurse said it must be a stomach bug.”

“Still,” she said. “Was it—was it what I said? I didn’t mean to upset you, Kaoru. I just—I guess I thought you just needed some prodding.”

“Did I?” he asked.

She nodded, and stared at her tea. He really couldn’t look at her now, not with all the evidence staring him in the face—her encouragement to help his friend, her disappointed but understanding attitude whenever he said he had something planned with Shinya, the way she’d gradually stopped needling him about college and his future and… everything. As if she’d realized, long before he did.

“I’ve been a terrible boyfriend,” he muttered.

“That’s not true!” Emi was quick to defend. “You’ve been great! You just—you’ve been worried, and a lot of things have happened, and—”

“I’m sorry,” he said as she broke off. “How long did you know?”

She went quiet. There were tears in her eyes; she said, “Tell me first. What you think I knew.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, dabbing at her tears with her handkerchief.

So he said, “I thought I loved you. I liked us being together. I liked the few dates we went on; I liked holding you; I liked our kisses. I was happy enough with that. I _am_ happy enough with that. But that’s not what you want, is it? You want a future and a family, and I can’t give you either of those things.”

“Why not?” she asked.

Kaoru thought of Dad, saying, “By the time I realized I was supposed to want those kind of things, everybody else around me was grown up. They had families of their own. I’d listen to the few single guys in the clan whine and moan about not havin’ a girl of their own, or I’d listen to them catcall some girl on the street, and I just wouldn’t get it. It never clicked. I could never see what they saw. Didn’t mean they didn’t try, but I never saw the point. Never.”

Kaoru said, “If you disappeared tomorrow like Shinya did, I’d be worried. I’d be worried enough to try to find you. But—when we found him, when we got him out of there, I was so scared it would all be some trick or some dream that I couldn’t look at him. I was terrified of him being taken away from me again when I should have been relieved, and I—” He sniffed. Emi shoved her face into her handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” he finished. “I’m just—so sorry. I thought I could love you. I thought I would love you more the longer we dated. But I don’t, and that’s not fair to you at all. I got your hopes up for nothing. You—you could be with someone else by now.”

“I don’t care about someone else,” she cried, muffled by fabric. “And I don’t care if you think you were leading me on. I was, too. I thought I could make you love me; I thought that if I wasn’t some pestering, clingy girlfriend you’d learn to love me more. But you never—you _never_ —”

Never tried to push her. Never tried to tease her like some of his classmates did their girlfriends. Never really touched her, either, always mindful of his hands and the complaints of his female classmates. He’d thought it made him a good boyfriend.

“I’m sorry,” he said, again, because nothing he thought before was true. Turned out he’d been lying to himself for over a year. “I thought I knew what you wanted, and how you wanted to be treated. But I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

He’d have to apologize to Shinya, too.

“You weren’t wrong,” she admonished. “I liked that. I liked that you treated me like a person with feelings instead some thing to enjoy. I liked that a lot. But the longer it went on, the more I started to think you weren’t really interested. I mean, you could never tell him no! You put him first! What was I—what was I supposed to think?”

“I don’t know.”

She sniffed. Her mascara was running; there were black streaks across her face, across her handkerchief. “I thought I made peace with this,” she said. “I thought someday you’d tell me you weren’t in love with me anymore, or you never had been, and I thought I wouldn’t cry. But I am. Because I didn’t want it to be true.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling like a broken record. It was all he could say. He loved her, but not enough. He loved her, but not in the way she wanted.

“And I wanted to be mature about it,” she went on. “I thought—I thought all the time, about what I’d say if you did. How I’d come out on top in the end for something witty. But I can’t think of anything to say other than that it’s not fair—how you never said it, how I thought I could fix you. So I’m sorry too. But, you know what, Kaoru?”

“Yeah?”

“We learned from this, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, and couldn’t look at her sad smile. “Yeah, we did.”

“And, because we learned from this, we won’t hurt anybody else like this, either, right?”

He wasn’t sure. Not loving Emi enough was one thing—was it possible for him not to love anyone enough? Could he and Dad really be that similar, despite not having blood ties?

Could it be that he would never love Shinya enough, too?

“I think we will,” he said, and her face crumpled. “I think we will, because we won’t recognize it, or we’ll forget by then. We’ll call it the follies of youth and think we’re better because we’re older, but it won’t be true. And I think it’s impossible to be that cognizant of our own actions one-hundred-percent of the time. At some point we’ll slip up and we’ll hurt someone. Or ourselves.”

Emi sniffed some more. Kaoru drank his tea—lukewarm, going cold—and got up to fix them both a new pot.

“Kaoru?” she asked, nursing her new cup.

“Yeah?”

“I’m still going to root for you, okay? I’ll be the first one to buy that book of yours. I’ll be your number one fan. So—so I want you to succeed, okay? I want you to be Japan’s number one, best-selling author, understand?”

“You have higher hopes for me than I do,” he said, thinking of the notebooks in his desk drawers, the meticulously detailed indexes of Prim’s far-off world and the handful of terrible sketches. Emi, who had sneaked a peek over his shoulder one morning as he worked on it at school, was the only one to know about it. He hadn’t dared to show Shinya.

… He hadn’t shown Dad, either. Munehisa Iwai was about as progressive a man as they came, but learning his son wanted to be an author? That would be too much.

Besides, unless Kaoru hit it big, he’d never be able to survive off that alone.

“You just don’t give yourself enough credit,” Emi said, still sniffling. Her tears had subsided, and all that was left of them was the puffiness of her eyes. They’d be swollen by the time she left. “You’ll be good, Kaoru. You’ll be the best. I believe it.”

“Thanks,” he said, feeling strange accepting her praise after everything they’d said to each other. “You will be, too. We’ll—we’ll both be great.”

“I’ll make medicine, and you’ll make stories,” Emi said, “and we’ll both be the best at it. Guaranteed.”

“Guaranteed,” he agreed. He couldn’t help but to stare at his cup again. “But—does this mean we’re…”

“We would have had to anyway once I got into that exchange program,” Emi said, though the lightness of her tone was betrayed by another sniff. “So… yeah, I think we are.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

That earned him a glare. “Don’t be sorry for not forcing yourself anymore. Don’t be sorry for not lying to me anymore. I want to stay friends, and that’ll be hard if you’re always apologizing.”

“You want to stay friends with your ex-boyfriend?”

“I just said so, didn’t I?”

She had. He nodded; he didn’t say that she would find someone better, or someone who loved her more than she deserved, although he wanted to. He wanted her to be happy; he wanted her to find someone who really loved her. But that would be difficult, Kaoru thought. No one would be as open with her as they were being with each other, right at that moment.

He felt sure of it: saying anything would jinx her love life for the rest of time.

So he said nothing.

When she rounded the table to hug him, he still said nothing. “Even if we don’t talk as much, we’ll always be friends, Kaoru. I’ll think of you every day of the week. And I’ll—I’ll move on, someday. I promise.”

“You do, huh,” he said.

“I do,” she confirmed. “So don’t beat yourself up over this. This isn’t either of our faults.” She giggled. “It’s just youth. We’re young and stupid. Good thing we realized it before things got too serious.”

“Yeah,” he said, imagining the fallout if this had happened after they were married with kids. For some reason, he couldn’t see himself walking away. He would have cared for her too much by then.

She sniffed one more time, and took her time at the genkan. Before she left, she said, “I still want to meet him. He’s got to be amazing, this Shinya you love so much.”

Before Kaoru had the chance to say anything, she was gone. All that was left of her was the cup on the table and the lingering scent of her perfume.

“That’s not fair, you know,” he said to the table, to the air, to her cup. “You can’t say it before I do.”

Because, try as he might to twist it, that was the truth: he loved Shinya more than he loved her. He loved Shinya, period.

He shoved his head in his hands and tried not to cry.

* * *

By the time the redhead was back the next day, Shinya was contemplating taking a nap out of sheer boredom. He’d tried helping down in the cafe and gotten chased out after a few minutes— _I don’t want a surprise visit from an inspector, kid_ —and he’d tried reading the books on the shelves by the other couch—all of them difficult, with a few art books and strength training manuals and coding guides shoved in for diversity—and then laid around, waiting for something to happen because he wasn’t one of those weirdos who worked out when there was nothing else to do.

So, when she creaked her way up the stairs and spotted him lounging on the couch, he was surprised she didn’t make an immediate grab for her laptop.

She stared at the pile of books he hadn’t put back and said, “You could have used the laptop. It’s a junk one; that’s why I leave it here.”

“You didn’t say that before.”

“Forgot,” she said, with a shrug, tugging a blanket off his pile and wrapping it around her shoulders. “Besides, I put my number in your phone. You could have asked—or you could have asked Sojiro. He’d have told you.”

So he could use the laptop, great. “You put your number in my phone?” he asked, scrabbling for it, and sure enough, there was a new contact in his still very short list: Alibaba. “When did you—”

“When I was tracking your mom’s phone, I looked through her call history and tracked those numbers, too. One of them could have been a cop hanging around her place for all I knew.” She shrugged again. She kept looking at the workbench, at the shelves of beans, at the pile of blankets—but not at him. “‘Course, yours was saved in her contact list, so I ruled that out—and then when it started moving here, I figured it was you.”

He stared at her. She stared, unflinchingly, at a spot on the wall where the paint was peeling. “You’re pretty weird,” he said. She flinched then. “You did all that by yourself?”

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I, um, also kinda looked at the stuff on your phone when I was falsifying the GPS data. Um.”

“You can do that?” he asked, turning the phone over in his hand.

“Well, yeah,” she said. “Lots of people do it. It’s not that special.”

Not that special, she said, as if Shinya had known it was a thing at all. “Oh,” he said, “so when you were hacking it, you put the number in.”

“Yeah.” Now she was blushing. “And you—you have that app.”

“What app?”

“ _That_ app,” she said. “The one that let you control someone on Ra Ciela.”

Shinya stared at her. She stared back, though her gaze wavered, and she went on, “One of my friends had it, too. And another one before that. I’ve—um, I’ve been collecting the data. I want to try to rig together a program like it—not like it’ll work, but I can try—but the data’s still pretty incomplete, since I never had access to the whole thing, and, uh. Who did you play? Was it the robot?”

Right, the one who saved the world. The one who protected the Emperor as he Sang a whole goddamn planet into being.

As if Shinya could ever play anyone so righteous. “I played Prim,” he admitted, and ignored the pain in his chest at her name.

He’d failed her, in the end. Death wasn’t winning; it was escape. She only had to die because he was there, on the other side of the screen, controlling her.

“You played—huh?”

“I played Prim,” he said again, and it didn’t hurt any less the second time. “Me and Kaoru did, together. I was only in it for the fighting, but he liked the story. I didn’t care what happened to her until he came along.”

“Right, you used to be the king of Gun About.” This time he flinched, then shot her a glare. “What?” she asked. “You _were_ the king. Number one in all of downtown Tokyo, at least. Not even the pros could beat you. Of course you didn’t like it for the story.”

“I haven’t played in years,” he said. “How do you know about it?”

“You’ve got a couple of really old bookmarks for Gun About forums on there.” She pointed to his phone. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out, once I did a little more digging.”

Did he? He flipped through his phone and, yeah, there they were. Just looking at them made his stomach upset.

There were too many old, forgotten things of the past being unearthed today. Gun About, Prim… next he’d be hearing about his gambling habits or his old hairstyle. One of his hands went for a scar on his ear.

The redhead said, “So, uh. C-could I—”

Shinya tossed his phone at her. It landed on the table with a clatter. “Don’t you dare mess with anything,” he warned, and she nodded, hands poised to grab it as if it was a poisonous snake. She picked it up gingerly, her hands shaking.

Shinya turned away from the sight of her handling his phone. It wasn’t a big deal, he told himself. He’d called Kaoru in the morning from the obnoxiously yellow public phone downstairs, and he was supposed to call again in an hour or so. He was dreading it; in the morning the owner had given him a cup of coffee that was almost entirely milk, the last dollop of flavor coalescing into a single spot. Like Kaoru’s god damn freckle, which Shinya did not want to remember.

“Prim was really important to us,” he said, trying to explain. “She’s what brought us together. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be sitting here. So—”

“Don’t fuck it up, got it,” the redhead said, and gave a sarcastic salute. “I’ve copied two complete apps and nothing’s gone wrong so far.” She stared at his phone. He stared at it, too.

God, he was—he really was trusting her with Prim. He really fucking was.

“If anything does, I won’t forgive you.”

“That’s fair,” she said. “I wouldn’t forgive me either.”

Down in the cafe, the bell on the door chimed; heavy feet made their way up the stairs. Okuma, pulling the strap of his bag over his head and complaining as it caught in his scarf, nearly tripping over the last step, which Shinya had learned the hard way was a millimeter or two too high from the rest.

“Hey,” Okuma said, once his bag and scarf were tossed into a corner for him to glare at.

“‘lo,” mumbled the redhead, still with Shinya’s phone in her hands.

“Should you be here?” Shinya asked, which was probably a dumb question. Okuma looked at him and grinned, halfway to laughter; his hair was spiked on one side, giving Shinya the impression he was trying to impersonate a fraying toothbrush.

“I should!” Okuma declared. “I bring handouts and news! Which one do you want first?”

“I don’t care,” Shinya said.

“Okay, great. So, guess who called the school and told them you were still out sick this morning?”

“Mom,” Shinya guessed. He shut his eyes. If she was trying to downplay all of this for his sake, no officer was going to get very far in an investigation. They’d want to talk to his teachers, who would want to know why the cops were asking after a sick kid.

Okuma mimed wiping a tear from his eye. “He’s so smart, our little Oda.”

Shinya didn’t throw the only pillow he had at Okuma’s head, though he contemplated it. It would probably hit his spiky hair and burst open into feathers or fluff like a water balloon popping.

He let his glare do the talking. Okuma backpedaled. “Okay, okay,” he said. “So, yeah, it was your mom. Any ideas why she’d lie about you going missing?”

“Because if anyone finds out I disappeared from a locked room, they’re going to think she’s nuts for more than one reason,” Shinya said. “Also, me running away means she’s not a good parent. As soon as anyone finds out, she’s lost.”

“Lost what?” Okuma asked. “She’s already lost you.”

“You can lose someone’s trust and respect,” the redhead joined in, brows furrowed. “But… the King used to say something all the time. ‘Once you’ve lost, it’s over.’ So she’ll… think that someone will take you away because she’s a bad mom?”

“She locked you in there for weeks and you still care about how everybody sees her?”

“Single moms have it tough,” the redhead told him. “Although you can still do everything right and have a perfect nuclear family and still wind up wrung through the gossip wringer. That’s just the way people are.”

Okuma’s face soured at that. “Yeah, I know.”

“That’s just how she’s been for forever,” Shinya said, although he couldn’t remember when she’d started it up. Around elementary school, he thought. Maybe one of the other parents had said something. Maybe a teacher had made a comment. Maybe they had said that Shinya’s bad behavior back then, his lack of interest in school, was because of her or his lack of a father.

It was bullshit. Kaoru turned out fine without a mom; why couldn’t Shinya turn out fine without a dad?

He said, “She’d always turn everything into a—a war. It could have been with the other parents, or with the teachers, or with… anybody. Back then, if I stubbed my toe on a piece of sidewalk she would have called the city planning committee to complain. Now…”

“Now she’ll shove you in a room, thinking it’ll keep you safe, sure,” Okuma said, all trace of his earlier joking attitude gone. “Keep telling yourself that. I think what she wants the most is some kind of control over you. You’re the only thing she’s ever had control of, and she’s not about to let you grow up and move out. Not if she can help it.”

Shinya thought of all those haircuts she’d given him over the past two years. He thought of the way she’d slapped him so hard he’d blacked out for a moment and fell to the floor and the way she’d gripped chunks of hair and snipped without rhyme or reason. He thought of the way he’d cried out in pain as she clipped his ear and how she’d scoffed and told him it was almost over, and how after it was all done she’d held him in an embrace so devoid of emotion it felt like falling into a black hole. She had smeared blood all over his neck, and she’d screamed at him the next day for the damage done to his school shirt.

Those first scars were gone now, faded into memory. But he had new ones to replace them, ones that felt just as deliberate and empty of meaning.

“No mom really wants that,” the redhead said. Shinya shook himself from his thoughts, trying to tune back into the conversation over the phantom pain in his ears. “But they gotta let go sometime. It’s life. This is just… weird.”

“She’s weird,” Shinya said. “No one at school was ever good enough to be my friend to her. When I do make one, she doesn’t like him because of a birthmark. If he’d looked any older, she probably would have called him a cradle robber.”

“Poor Iwai.” Okuma winced.

“Well, you see stuff like that online a lot, too,” the redhead said. “People always think whatever they want. You can’t stop them.”

Okuma mumbled agreement. Shinya was the one who said, “Can we just… stop, for today? I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

He didn’t want to think of his mom, obsessively locking and unlocking his door, hoping that if she did it enough he would reappear on the other side to tell her to stop. She wouldn’t listen; she never did. He really didn’t want to think of what else she could be doing—wandering the streets screaming his name at the top her lungs like a lost pet? Calling every police box and station in Tokyo to be on the lookout? Sitting alone in her empty apartment, running her fingertips down the chair he used at meals?—and he was tired, in general, and the attic was chilly.

Rain began to batter the window. Okuma groaned that it would freeze by morning.

The redhead’s phone went off. “Seven. Dinner,” she declared, shoving her hands in her hoodie pockets, Shinya’s phone and all, and retreating down the stairs.

When she was gone, Okuma dug the handouts out of his bag. He left them on the table. “You have to think about it sometime.”

“I know,” Shinya said. “I _know_. If I could change her, I would, but I can’t. She won’t listen to a word I say; she won’t listen to a word anybody else says, either. They’re always wrong or she’s always losing. That’s just how it is.”

He was repeating himself. He’d said the same thing to Kaoru years ago; Kaoru hadn’t gotten it until she’d called him a delinquent to his face, even with Shinya under her hand telling her Kaoru wasn’t, even with Kaoru trying to apologize for keeping him out without her permission.

He didn’t want to know what she’d think of Okuma, with his ridiculous hair and even more mercurial attitude. He didn’t want to know what she’d think of the redhead girl and the dingy attic Shinya was sleeping in.

“Well,” Okuma said, “maybe this will convince her to change.”

And maybe pigs would be flying tomorrow. Maybe all the rain would turn into cats and dogs. Shinya scoffed.

… But a little part of him hoped that maybe she might. Even Prim had fought against fate and won; why couldn’t his mom do the same?

 _Because she isn’t suited to change_ , some other part of him hissed, and he knew it was right. Whenever her shifts at work changed suddenly, or whenever the grocery store was out of her favorite brand of rice or shampoo, or whenever the programs on TV were changed up due to an over-long movie or holiday marathon, she handled it as well as a five-year-old being told no for the first time: with extreme vitriol. Shinya was surprised that she didn’t break down into tears every time it happened.

Actually, maybe she did: maybe her yelling and screaming and tossing throw pillows around the room was how she cried. Maybe, in the absence of all those things, in the middle of the night when she couldn’t make so much noise, she cried.

Maybe. Maybe.

Shinya sighed. He burrowed deeper into his blankets and the couch cushions and eyed the packet on the table: almost as thick as a fingertip, almost certainly as dry and dull as sitting around up here with nothing to do… “Has Mr. Mori said anything?”

“Mr. Mori? No,” Okuma said. “Why? Does he know about all this, too?”

“He’d better not,” Shinya growled, because the last thing Mr. Mori deserved was to get caught in the crossfire of Kaoru’s stupid plan. “He should only know what the teachers do, which’ll be whatever my mom tells them. I’m tired of thinking about it.”

“You’re the one who brought it up,” Okuma said, but didn’t press. He rolled the tips of his bangs in his fingers, looking everywhere but at Shinya, and at some point in the quiet, with the lull of the rain pattering on the window, Shinya fell asleep.

He dreamed he was trapped in a high tower. The air was thin, that high off the ground, and he grew his hair out to use as a ladder to escape, and at some time in the night after it had grown long enough to reach the ground, his mother came in and sheared his head, tossing what was left out the window. With a snap of her fingers the window was bricked up.

Life sucked, he decided when he woke to thunder and a drip in the ceiling. It was off in the other half of the attic, the one cluttered with all amount of junk and debris and a bunch of other shit the owner couldn’t or didn’t want to throw away. Shinya stumbled past the mess, down the stairs, and into the tiny bathroom, then out into the kitchen; there was always leftover curry in the fridge, and Shinya helped himself to a plate and a bottle of soda.

The whole place was dark, lit with the emergency exit light by the bathroom and whatever light from the street that managed to filter its way in through the screen on the front window; Shinya ate his dinner tucked away in the kitchen, where he didn’t have to worry about being spotted and mistaken for a ghost by some wayward drunk with too-perceptive eyes, and cleaned up when he was done, washing out the bottle and filling it with water.

The less trips he made down here in the night, the better.

Once he was back up in the attic, though, he floundered for something to do. His nap had been way too long—five hours was almost a full night’s sleep, damn it—and while he was still sleepy, he felt far too awake to try and drift off again.

Shinya blamed the storm. The rain was mixed with the soft hiss of snow, now, and somewhere over Tokyo lightning lit up the sky; thunder rumbled again. He thought of bricks laying themselves neatly on top of one another, blocking his only way out; he thought of the prick of stubble under his fingers and felt for the hair at his temple. Still the way he’d left it hours earlier. He let out a shaky breath and shuffled over to the heater in the corner and wound up watching the rain slide down the window. Every time he thought he’d stop, he kept going.

It was soothing. Cathartic. Hypnotic. Every other fancy dictionary word he’d learned for his entrance exams that didn’t matter anymore because it wasn’t likely he’d be going, and then he’d be out of school with nothing to look forward to than going back to his mother and getting a job to pay the bills. If she let him. If she let him do anything at all when he went crawling back to her because she was everything he needed and she’d made damn sure of it.

Who else was he supposed to go to? Kaoru? Mr. Iwai, with his yakuza connections and middle school diploma? Mr. Mori, who’d probably be shoved under a bus so the school wouldn’t have to deal with this?

There was no one else—no one who wouldn’t be hurt, or have their future ruined, or any number of other possible things that Shinya’s mother was likely planning. She was a goddamn vulture, preying on everything he found dear, finding ways to turn it against her and, therefore, against him. Because anything that hurt him was a slight against her, and to keep him safe it was better and easier to feed him lies and half-truths and every shitty imagining she’d ever had.

God _damn_ it.

How was he supposed to escape now? He was out of his room—out of the tower, out of the darkness and the faint sliver of light giving her eyes a maniacal glint—but he was still stuck, still trapped, still a prisoner to her whims.

Shinya threw his water bottle across the room. It hit the wall and fell to the floor and his fingers itched for the next thing to throw and clamped around the heater’s handle before he could think twice about it. The thing was so heavy his skinny twig arms could lift it barely an inch off the floor.

That just pissed him off more.

He gripped it harder, dug his feet in, didn’t care about the scald of hot metal against his knee as he heaved upward with everything he had but didn’t so much as clear his toes. The heater thunked back down to the floor; the rain and snow whispered even harder against the window, laughing; thunder chortled overhead.

“Fuck you!” he shouted. The attic didn’t answer back; the rain didn’t care. His third attempt ended with the heater slamming into one of his toes; this time he dropped it, barely caring as it tottered.

All that mattered was that he finally hurt on the outside almost the same way he hurt on the inside; all that mattered was that when someone asked—and who would, in the middle of the night during a winter storm?—he could answer truthfully that he’d stubbed his toe in the dark, and not that he was thinking on how utterly pitiful his future prospects had become overnight.

All that mattered was that the hot tears streaming down his face had a reason. No one would blame him, if they saw. No one would care that he curled up into a ball on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest and burying his face in them, and cried.

And cried.

And cried.

Shinya cried until his head ached and his vision swam; he cried until his throat felt scraped raw and his nose was so stuffed he couldn’t breathe through it. He cried until his pants were soaked through—or so it felt—and his shirt, too, from where he’d scrubbed his cheeks on it.

And—unlike that time after he’d lost Prim, it wasn’t cathartic. Shinya was glad Kaoru wasn’t around to watch him slam shit around, but Kaoru had been the one to hold him, to rub circles into his back, to tell him that even if he lost, Prim was happy. That sometimes you won by losing. That even the best strategists and e-gamers lost every now and then.

Shinya’s hands ached for something to hold, something to wrap around and squeeze. Maybe it didn’t have to be Kaoru, he told himself, as he got to his feet and retrieved his water bottle. Kaoru was just the only person who wouldn’t complain; there were better substitutes, like the pile of blankets and the couch cushions and the pillows. Shinya gathered them all up into a mass even bigger than he was wide, flopped onto it, and squeezed.

It was not cathartic. Not in the slightest. It was just a mass of soft cloth, some of it clammy with fear-sweat, the pillows still dented by his head. He tried not to think that it wasn’t the same because it wasn’t Kaoru, but it was true: it wasn’t the same if it wasn’t Kaoru.

“Don’t be so stupid,” he told himself. He could hug someone else if he wanted; it just wasn’t likely that it would be anywhere near as calming as Kaoru was.

… He’d forgotten to call Kaoru. Maybe Okuma had done it for him; Shinya would have to sneak downstairs in the morning and do it then and hope Kaoru would forgive him. He would. He had to.

Shinya groaned. It was all the rain’s fault, and the chilly attic’s fault, and the warmth of the blanket pile’s fault. It was long days spent with nothing to do in his room at the apartment until he fell asleep out of boredom. How many days had he slept through? How many weeks had gone by before Kaoru and Okuma dared to break him out? How much longer was it until the entrance exams? Would he even be allowed to graduate at this rate?

Shit. Would he?

He dared a glance at the packet, still sitting on the table. Okuma hadn’t touched it after Shinya fell asleep, and it was so damn thick Shinya didn’t want to open it… which meant it was full of handouts and notes and maybe a quiz or two. Maybe it would be enough to send him back to sleep—boring history, dull English, monotonous social sciences—and he reached for it without thinking twice, undoing the clasp and spilling the contents across the table.

He got up to switch a light on, earlier paranoia forgotten, and wound up staring at the tabletop. Scrawled across the notes, in the margins and blank spaces, were well-wishes.

Shinya picked one up. **Come back to school soon** , it read, underneath a bullet-point list of Oda Nobunaga’s staff officers and their achievements.

Another, over the top of a diagram of a cell: **It feels weird without you here!!**

Another, scribbled into the margin of a long English passage broken down and highlighted in at least five different colors: **Everything will get better.**

 _Bullshit_ , Shinya thought, before realizing that these notes weren’t for him. He couldn’t even tell whose handwriting it was, outside of Miyauchi’s million highlighters. She always had them lined up on her desk every English class, she said they helped her figure out what was what that much faster on the tests—

But that wasn’t his business. He’d never said more than a handful of words to pretty much anybody in his class. He’d only ever talked to Mr. Mori—Okuma had been the first classmate he’d talked to since first year. None of these people should care.

No, the notes weren’t for him. Okuma would be by tomorrow to drop off another packet; Shinya could give it to him then, say that he got them mixed up. That had to be it: there was another student out sick, someone the whole class cared for, someone they missed enough to write stupid little messages on their notes for. He gathered them up: science, history, English, literature… and stopped at the end. Buried under them all was a thick, stapled packet of calculus problems, Mr. Mori’s handwriting a sudden blurry mess the longer Shinya stared at it.

No one else in class would be learning calculus. No one else would be learning it because it was more challenging than algebra; no one else would write a note on the front of the packet saying he wished he could do more.

No one else would make Shinya terribly aware that all of these notes, and from people he’d barely talked to, were really for him. Whether they’d done it because they wanted to or because Okuma asked them didn’t matter.

They were for him. They were for _him_.

Even though he’d done nothing to deserve them, they were for _him_.


	5. The Consultation

Kaoru waited until Shinya’s exams were over to go back to Leblanc. Shinya had insisted on it over the phone, and when he used that particular tone of voice Kaoru knew there was no fighting him on the matter. So he waited, a nervous twist in his gut as the date blew by, hoped Shinya was studying in what little time he had left, dodged Dad’s questions about Emi, and pulled out the notebooks in his desk when it all got too much.

(Emi believed in him. For some reason, he felt giddier than when she confessed.)

When it was all over, he meandered down the alleyways of Yongen-jaya, got lost several times, and wound up asking for directions on at least four different occasions—but when the little cafe finally came into view, Kaoru paused outside the door. The shade was drawn over the large window in front, but the sign parked by the door looked like different handwriting.

 _Weird_ , Kaoru thought, studying it. It wasn’t Shinya’s. It might have been a part-timer’s, or Alibaba’s. The messy scrawl attempting to look neat and orderly could be how her hacker fingers wrote out kanji.

It was strange, how someone could be so proficient at one thing and so terrible at another.

But he had her to thank for helping him break Shinya out. He hoped the cookies he made put a small dent in the debt he owed her; he didn’t know what he was going to do about the shop owner. Beer, maybe, when he was old enough to buy it? Business?

At least Okuma and his friends were easy to deal with. They’d taken their tins with grins on their faces—Morita had said something about not swinging that way, which Kaoru supposed worked fine enough as an explanation—and Okuma had said something about maybe getting lessons when he tore the tin open and started eating them right there.

So Kaoru could cook. It wasn’t that difficult.

Steeling himself, he opened the cafe door. The owner stood behind the bar, wiping down the coffee press and some cups; he pointed a thumb at the ceiling, saying nothing. The dark-haired part-timer washing dishes by the TV glanced over as Kaoru went by, then went right back to staring down the suds.

The attic was even dustier, if that was possible. Alibaba sat by the window, cracked open despite the chill in the air, and typed at such a furious pace that Kaoru became concerned for her fingers and jealous in the space of a second. What he wouldn’t give to type like that—except Shinya, and Dad. The gods could take everything else.

Shinya perked up from his spot on the couch; he’d been lounging and playing a game system that came out before they were both born, scowling at the screen and hissing something about cheating, but his face changed in an instant. “Did you bring them?” he asked, setting aside the controller. 8-bit music continued to pour out of the TV speakers. Kaoru was sure it hadn’t been there before, but it had also been dark and he’d been so exhausted with relief that even the walk home had carried a dream-like quality to it.

“Yeah,” Kaoru said, handing over the bag. Shinya ripped into it, tugging out packs of socks and underwear and t-shirts, pencils and notebooks and erasers, shampoo and toothpaste and soap, the few loose pairs of jeans and sweatpants and sweaters and jackets on the bottom. Those were Kaoru’s old things, too narrow in the shoulder and too short at the hem to do him much good anymore, but they fit Shinya nearly perfectly with a bit of extra room to spare.

“I can see you,” Alibaba warned as Shinya went to try on the pants. Her breakneck typing didn’t slow even as Shinya frowned at her and dragged the pile down the stairs.

Kaoru tidied up the mess Shinya had left on the table, then straightened out the pillows and blankets on the couch, then stood there staring at a speck of dust as it floated through the air, wondering if it would be worth it to get Shinya to clean.

“Don’t bother, you’ll break your neck,” Alibaba said as he eyed the rafters and the cobwebs in the corners.

“You sound pretty sure about that,” Kaoru said.

“There’s a ladder over there somewhere, but good luck finding it,” she said, gesturing to the other half of the attic, cramped with clutter. “And besides, this place was super old before Sojiro bought it. Wood’s probably rotting by now. May as well let nature take its course.”

“Uh-huh,” Kaoru said, slowly. What a weird way to say she didn’t want to be roped into it—and at this point, if Shinya hadn’t taken care of it, it must have been fine. Kaoru didn’t have to like it, but it was… fine.

He sat and dug through his bag until he touched on the tin of cookies. Cookies weren’t enough, but they were all he really had to give. His savings was supposed to be for college things, and not repaying suspicious hackers and middle school delinquents in the making.

No, cookies would never be enough. But he’d made them, and he’d be damned if they went to waste.

“Um,” he said, before the words stopped in his throat. Alibaba still didn’t take her eyes off her screen, and her typing still didn’t slow, but her head turned a bit in his direction. The tin was in his hand now, and he had to look dumb, sitting there with his hand stuffed in his bag. “I, uh, made you these,” he said, setting the tin on the table. “I know it’s not much, but it’s all I can really give as a thank you, so…”

At that, she paused long enough to look, but went right back to typing. “Hey, if you want. Your friend already gave me my payment. And even if he didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing this for thanks.”

“That’s—” he sighed. “You don’t know what it means to me, knowing that he’s here and safe. Not thanking you would feel wrong, somehow, so I am—and what do you mean, he’s already paid you?”

Shinya’s mom made decent enough money, but it wasn’t enough to give him an allowance every week, and even if he saved it up, Kaoru doubted it was enough to pay off a hacker. ‘And even if he didn’t-—what did that mean?

Alibaba paused once more, this time huffing in annoyance. “My friend downstairs and your friend have one thing in common. Guess what it is.”

“Uh,” Kaoru said, at a loss. The part-timer down in the cafe was at least twenty, with the beginnings of beard stubble showing on his chin. Shinya was just a middle school kid in the middle of puberty.

Alibaba glanced back at her laptop. “Prim,” she said, and he started. “They both have the app on their phones. All I did was make a copy of what was left when he… beat the game.”

She said it like she didn’t quite believe it was a game that could be beaten. Most mobile games were like that, with everything anyone needed to advance trapped behind paywalls and subscriptions and with a plot that never ended, or levels that went into the thousands. And besides…

“But we didn’t beat it.” Kaoru was sure of that. There had been no ending credits, no epilogue where everyone was living happily-ever-after. “We lost the final battle. Prim was the antagonist, so if she lost—”

“Are you really that stupid?” Alibaba snapped. “If she won, that would’ve been worse. You think that god-thing would have stopped at one world? One dimension? You think it wouldn’t have made its way here to devour us next? You _lost_ , but you _won_ , because everything didn’t go to hell in a hand basket.”

Kaoru shook his head. He knew that, and Alibaba had to know that he did, if Shinya had told her about the app, but. “I don’t like bittersweet endings like that. Ones where disaster’s averted, but half the people who go to stop it don’t come back, or ones where it’s ambiguous whether they succeeded at all. I hate those kinds of endings.”

That was why he put Prim’s book down. He’d gotten all the way to that last boss, up to the part where Prim pleaded and begged and fought for control, and couldn’t manage to write any more. He knew how it ended and he knew any reader who picked it up would hate it, too, but to give it a better ending he’d have to tell the winner’s side of the story, and that just wasn’t fair to Prim.

“Oh,” Alibaba said, all the fight drained out of her. “You don’t like sacrifice. That’s all.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” he defended, feeling his face heat up. He had yet to beat _Call of the Wild_ , if only because every time he met one of the spirit guardians he nearly burst into tears. Whenever Shinya was over and felt like watching, he always wound up running around at random, taking out enemy encampments until Shinya got bored.

Alibaba snorted. “Nobody likes those types of stories. That’s why even the terrible ones have good endings; it’s all gotta be worth it in the end.” She frowned. “And for you, it wasn’t worth it.”

He nodded. He’d thought it was a neat game mechanic, getting to choose Prim’s answers and questions and hearing her say them just a bit differently than he imagined. Not many games took that approach with their silent protagonists, even if Prim was anything but silent. He opened his mouth to say something else, but stopped at the creak of the stairs.

The part-timer and Shinya, with trays of food in their hands and Shinya’s new pants draped over his shoulders like a towel. Alibaba blinked as they made space for all the food on the table. “I can eat here today? I thought Mom was—”

“She called Boss and said she’s going to be late tonight,” the part-timer told her, then turned to Shinya. “U-unless you guys want some privacy. Futaba and I can eat downstairs.”

Shinya scoffed. “And carry all this back down? No way. She’d break her skinny twig arms just picking up her spoon.”

“Hey!” Alibaba protested, shoving her laptop aside and digging into her own schoolbag. She turned her back once she found what she was looking for, then marched over to the table and the only empty spot left: an old wooden chair that looked like it had seen better days.

Shinya snickered as she gave a list of all the things she could carry, and Kaoru shoveled curry into his mouth to keep from gaping.

Shinya, enjoying other people’s company? It was impossible.

Yet it was happening, right in front of him. Shinya had even told her about Prim, the one thing that even Kaoru still had trouble discussing. She was a splinter lodged firmly into the skin of their relationship, and yet Shinya had broken their unsaid vows never to speak of her with anyone else.

Well, that was good, reasoned Kaoru. What was better was watching Shinya laugh with someone other than him, even when Shinya got too into his goading and stepped on Kaoru’s foot. Shinya was here, and safe, and finally making friends on his own.

It was almost enough to make Kaoru forget about why he’d trekked all the way out into the maze of back-alleys. The tin of cookies was still on the table, and Shinya was eyeing it like he had plans to rip it open and devour the contents the second dinner was over.

“So, um,” Alibaba said, as she toyed with her food, “well, uh… I guess we have to thank you guys, too.”

“For what?” both the part-timer and Shinya said at the same time. Shinya glared at him; the part-timer went back to his meal after a glance.

Alibaba played with her spoon for a while, then blurted out, “Because they’re Prim’s players.”

The part-timer started. His spoon flew out of his hand; he scrabbled for it, couldn’t manage to catch hold of it, and groaned as it hit the floor. Kaoru passed him a napkin as he came back in sight.

He took it, wrapped his dirty spoon in it, and said, “Don’t surprise me like that! Geez, I nearly had a heart attack.”

“Why?” Shinya asked.

“He’s a nervous wreck, that’s why,” Alibaba said, and the part-timer dodged the elbow to the ribs she sent his way. “Also I might’ve told him you guys were important. Guess he didn’t realize how much.”

Shinya scoffed. “For playing a game? For losing it?”

Maybe he couldn’t see it, then. Underneath the peach fuzz and the bags under his eyes was a man blinking back tears, clutching at his chest like his heart would beat right out of it.

There’d been speculation online about a guy who knew a bit too much about the lost kids. Kaoru had read every rumor, every bit of gossip, and every news article but had come up with nothing more than he’d started out with.

“I never told you,” Alibaba told the part-timer, “but I was, um, there. When Inari beat the final boss, when he beat Prim, and, uh, after. For a bit. I dunno how long it was over there, but it didn’t seem like much time at all, and—”

She cleared her throat, addressing the table: “Prim came back from the dead. Her parents and Inari and Akira—they worked really hard to make a miracle happen. And they did.”

Shinya scowled, glaring at her. “People don’t come back from the dead.”

“Prim wasn’t exactly a person,” Kaoru reminded him, even as he wondered who Akira was. He could almost remember Prim’s parents calling Ionasal that, but it was so long ago and he’d been so focused on Shinya, that he couldn’t be sure anymore.

But it must have been. Who else could they be talking about?

“Person, fairy, god—it doesn’t matter.” He very nearly slammed his hand on the table, just to make a point, but stopped himself short. “She was dead. We watched her drift apart, like—like she was made of fucking sand. People don’t do that, and if they did, they wouldn’t come back from it.”

Alibaba looked ready to toss her hands in the air. “Look, I don’t know how they did it! I just know that they managed it, okay? And when Prim came back, the first thing she did was tell everyone where to find God. She said God would send them back. She said _you_ were the ones to tell her, so _you’re_ the reason Akira’s coming home.”

“Oh,” the part-timer gasped, and reached a hand up to wipe at his eyes.

Kaoru passed him another napkin. “But we didn’t tell her. We couldn’t talk with her at all. It was—it was just a game, right? She couldn’t have heard us.”

“Akira could hear me,” the part-timer said, in a voice so soft it seemed like he couldn’t believe it himself. “At the end, he could hear me.”

Shinya was still scowling, his frown etched so deep into his face Kaoru was sure it would freeze that way. “That’s good for you, but we never talked to Prim,” Shinya said. “Why would we? She was just a—just a character in a game. And even if we did, we never mentioned where to find God.”

Not at the end, he wasn’t saying. Shinya had been too preoccupied with trying his hardest to lose while trying his hardest to win while trying not to have a breakdown over his mother. Kaoru remembered holding him as tight as he could, and could remember the way Shinya had shaken in his arms, and could remember the blood from his split lip staining their shirts. The Game Over screen had been red as blood, shining from the bedspread.

“Well, we did,” Kaoru said, as Alibaba opened her mouth to argue, “but it—it had been a while before then. I mentioned it offhand, remember, Shinya? I thought the glossary picture was an interesting take on a god’s image.”

“I guess,” Shinya said, and his frown lessened from a scowl to be more thoughtful. He shifted in place, then said, “I might’ve mentioned it, too. When, uh. After the. The thing.”

“The _thing_ ,” Alibaba said, teasing, and even the part-timer grinned a bit. Then he went back to crying.

It was definitely odd, watching a grown man cry.

“That was the night you stayed over, right?” Kaoru asked, just to be sure. They’d never talked about that night: what they did, what actually happened.

He realized, just then, that the only thing they had never talked about was that night. Shinya had been more terrified of losing him than he had been of losing Prim.

“You were gone,” Shinya said, softly, “and I was fucking scared, okay? And you—you said it was a god, and I thought—you know, if there are gods out there that listen to brats like me, maybe it’d be that one. So I played the game and I kept saying it until your dad brought you home. Prim was probably the reason I didn’t go crazy waiting. I didn’t move for hours.”

Not until Kaoru had returned, with his socks thoroughly ruined with street muck. His feet had hurt so much he couldn’t ignore them through the euphoria of learning that Dad really did love him, that he wasn’t a burden, that everything Kaoru did made him proud.

He’d only learned later that Dad wasn’t interested in having a family of his own. Kaoru hadn’t been holding him back from that.

The part-timer sniffed. “If she heard you, you must have been connected, at least for a while. I don’t know how it works. Maybe you had similar thoughts, and your wavelengths synchronized for a while. She might’ve heard you then.”

Shinya said nothing, chewing his lip. Kaoru couldn’t stand the sight and tugged him in close; even after two years and the start of his growth spurt, Shinya was still small. Fragile, almost; fine-boned in the way only children were.

What would he be like when he was older? Would he still be small enough to tuck under Kaoru’s chin, or would Shinya have to bury his face in Kaoru’s neck? Would he bulk up, like Kaoru was?

Would he stop needing Kaoru and comfort?

The part-timer sniffed again. Alibaba messed with the tin of cookies, pushing it this way and that before popping it open and taking one. She passed it to the part-timer, who took one. He passed it to Shinya, his face half-buried in Kaoru’s chest. Shinya took two, and pushed the tin away. He pressed the extra one into Kaoru’s free hand.

They sat there for a moment. No one seemed inclined to eat.

“Um,” the part-timer said. He raised his cookie high, as if it were a glass of champagne or sparkling cider. “To Prim?”

“Good enough for me,” Alibaba said, though she couldn’t look up from the table, and raised hers.

“No,” Shinya argued, and the two blinked in confusion. “To Kaoru. He’s the one who told me. Prim might’ve repeated it, but—it was because of Kaoru I knew it to say it. To Kaoru.”

“What, no—” Kaoru started to protest, but was beat by Alibaba’s grin.

“To Kaoru!” she declared with snicker tacked on the end.

“To Kaoru!” the part-timer echoed, with a shaky smile.

“To Kaoru!” Shinya said, voice gone soft again. Kaoru couldn’t see his expression, but could guess at the slight smirk on his face.

Kaoru didn’t dignify any of it with a response; he stuffed the cookie in his mouth and chewed, and chewed, and wished he had the guts to say what he came to say after all.

* * *

Dad was home when Kaoru got back, the empty tin of cookies rattling in his bag. It felt like too much effort to wrestle his shoes off, so he sat on the genkan and stared at the door.

Dad popped his head out of the kitchen. “You alright there, Kaoru?”

“Yeah, I’m just tired,” Kaoru said. And angry, and annoyed, and fully kicking himself for not taking the part-timer up on his offer of privacy. And overjoyed that something good had come out of the mess that had been that mobile game. And kind of proud it had been him to cause it all.

And confused—surely he and Shinya should have seen that good ending. Surely they were worthy of learning Prim came back from the dead, and all they’d gotten instead was that Game Over screen. It didn’t make sense.

“Oh yeah?” Dad said, ducking back into the kitchen. He was washing the dishes; Kaoru could hear the slop of water as it ran over the sides of the dishpan and the bang as a pot hit the side of the sink.

“Shinya’s fine,” Kaoru offered, resting his head on the wall. He should have done the dishes before he left. He’d wanted to, but recognized it as his own attempt to procrastinate, and had triumphed, briefly, on his walk to the station.

“That so?”

“Yeah,” Kaoru said. “It was snowing when I left. Is that why you came home early?”

“Ain’t nobody coming out in this kinda weather,” Dad said. “Waste of money to be sittin’ around on my hands waitin’ for somebody to walk through the door.” He sniffed. He always complained about his nose running when it got cold enough. “‘Sides, thought we could go out for dinner. Someplace special, since we didn’t get to last year. Maybe some other time, then.”

Kaoru lay on his back, still in his coat, and peered into the kitchen. Dad, in his thick thermal socks and heavy jeans and an even heavier sweater, with suds up to his elbows and a trail trickling down his cheek. There was more gray in his hair than Kaoru remembered. He felt like there was always more gray than he remembered.

Everyone was growing up and getting old. Even Shinya; even Kaoru; even Dad.

And it wasn’t as if he didn’t want to celebrate, it just seemed like a waste to do it now, a year after his acceptance letter came in. But he’d tried, unlike Dad, and Dad would never let him forget it.

And that was enough reason to celebrate.

“Ice cream,” he said.

Dad laughed. “You want ice cream in this weather?”

“That just makes it better. It lasts longer, and it doesn’t get all over your hands.”

Dad shook his head, but from the smile on his face, Kaoru had won. There was a parlor two stops over that was deserted—and that was run by some guy Dad had worked with briefly, back when he was supposed to be high school—and they took advantage of the slow day the weather was causing to catch up. The guy was more impressed by Dad having a son than he was of Kaoru being in college, and as Kaoru crunched through the obscene amount of toppings he’d ordered, watching two grown men laugh, he realized what was wrong with Prim’s story:

She had no one. Kaoru had come in too late in the game to get a read on her personality before she was controlled, and after that—she was always angry, picking up on Shinya’s emotions but likely not even knowing where they were coming from. She hated her parents for being human, and she hated Ionasal for working against her, and she exploded at Goro more times than Kaoru could count. She hadn’t made friends. She was alone.

No one could go through life alone.

Yet they’d been denied the part where she was happy and surrounded by everyone who loved her, living a life void of the strife and conflict she’d been forced to endure aboard the Soreil. Not having to fight her parents or her friends—being able to laugh with them, and get angry over silly things like who ate the last cookie from the tin, and having her own will…

If only they could say goodbye. If only Shinya had the chance to hear Prim forgive him for controlling her.

Then he wondered if she had to do it herself.

No, he thought as they left the parlor. No, she had to, or Shinya wouldn’t accept it. He’d say it was wishful thinking; he’d say Kaoru shouldn’t put words in her mouth. He’d want to know how Kaoru could possibly know what she was thinking, and whether it was just something he wanted her to think or not.

It would be no different from controlling her. It would be no different from Shinya’s mother ignoring the words coming out of his mouth for her own delusions.

“You got all quiet again, kid,” Dad said, when the silence had stretched on for too long. “Too cold for ya after all?”

“No, it’s not that.” Kaoru was sure that between the cookies and the toppings on his ice cream he was going to crash hard later. He wouldn’t have the energy to outline a new ending until tomorrow at the latest. “You, uh, were asking before—about Emi. I didn’t want to tell you, but we broke up. She said we were going to have to anyway. She’s been trying to get into an exchange program and go to school overseas.”

Dad hummed. They moved out of the way of a guy shoveling the sidewalk in front of his store; Kaoru wondered what the point of it was, when it was likely to snow all night. Come morning it would be as if no one had touched it.

But maybe he, too, was whiling away the hours until he returned home again.

“But I’m the one who broke up with her,” Kaoru admitted. “I’d been thinking too much again, about stuff like—if her parents did to her what Shinya’s mom did to him, would I be that worried? So worried I couldn’t sleep at night? It didn’t feel like I would. So I started to wonder if I really loved her. Most of the other couples at school can’t keep their hands off each other, and I’d—I’d only kiss her if she started it. I thought I didn’t love her enough, and I thought that wasn’t fair to her, so I told her that.”

Or something like it, anyway.

Dad wasn’t looking at him, watching the sidewalk for slick ice patches instead. “That so?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And it’s—it’s not your fault, Dad. Don’t think it is. This is just the way I am, too.”

Dad nodded. For a brief moment, there was a strip of skin on his neck uncovered by scarf and earmuff, and it flashed white against the dark cloth and darkened street.

It would hurt him if Kaoru asked, but he had to. “Were you hoping I wasn’t? Were you hoping I was, I don’t know—normal?”

Dad took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. “Don’t like that word. ‘Normal.’ Makes you think there’s somethin’ wrong with ya. But it’s true most of the time, ain’t it? There’s people like your classmates and my old yakuza buddies who can’t keep their hands to themselves, and then there’s me and you.”

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Snow fell harder, digging icy fingers under Kaoru’s scarf, dripping wet trickles down his collar. When Dad turned, shadows outlined the wrinkles on his face. He looked ten years older. Kaoru’s breath stuck somewhere in his lungs and refused to move.

“Kaoru,” Dad said. “Son. _My_ son. No matter who or how you love, I can’t be anything but proud, understand?”

He stopped there. Kaoru filled in the blanks: _because you’ve gotten farther than I did; because you will always go farther than I did; because you’re my son._

Kaoru said, “I think I’m in love with Shinya. Not in the same way that he loves me. Not exactly. But I can’t imagine a life without him in it anymore.”

“That so?” Dad said, nodding like he knew this was coming. “Sounds like love to me, kid. Not that I’m some expert on it.”

And as they continued down the street, Kaoru wondered if that was true. Could he say he was in love with Shinya if he only wanted to hold him tight and never let go? How was this feeling any different from the same possessiveness that consumed Shinya’s mother? Was Kaoru the same as her, in the end?

He couldn’t be. He wouldn’t be. He’d rather watch Shinya drift away from him than lock him away to perpetuate his own happiness. He’d broken Shinya out of his prison to give him his freedom back; Kaoru wasn’t keen on the thought that he might take it away himself, someday.

But… the night was long. Those awful two weeks were over. The sugar high was kicking in; he tugged his phone out.

Better get started early.

* * *

After Kaoru left, Shinya took the bit of spare change from the bottom of his bag and headed over to the laundromat across the street to wash his new clothes. Futaba came along, complaining of the chill and the snow that had started to fall and the noisiness of the ancient washers as Shinya fed the first one coins, then the other.

New clothes. More outfits than he could wear in a week. _Finally_.

As the washers started up, Shinya settled back with the sudoku book Mr. Mori had sneaked into his latest packet of handouts. Futaba glanced over his shoulder and groaned.

“You don’t have to stay,” he said.

But she, too, settled in with her laptop. Shinya still felt weird using it, and it mostly sat on the workbench and collected dust; he never thought he’d enjoy the rest of his subjects, but they were plenty distracting from thinking about his mom or Kaoru, and he always saved whatever extra work Mr. Mori could sneak inside for last.

Like today and the book of expert-level sudoku puzzles. Shinya, for once, had to erase and do over lines so often the ink on the pages wore away. Sometimes he’d glance up and Futaba would be staring past him at the comings and goings of the bathhouse patrons, while other times she would be focused on her work, and yet other times she would be staring right at him, brows furrowed, lips working.

“What?” he asked, when he caught her at it for the third time. The first washer stopped, and he unloaded it into a dryer, fed that one coins, and started it. The dryer was worse than the washer: louder, with a rumble that he could feel in his teeth.

“He’s a lot older than you, isn’t he?” she blurted out.

The second washer stopped. Shinya scooped out the laundry and did the same as the first. “Four years isn’t a lot,” he defended.

“It is to some people.”

“Then they can fuck off,” Shinya growled, and slammed the dryer shut. “It’s none of their business who I like. He doesn’t even like me back. Not like that. He has a girlfriend.”

“Uh-huh,” Futaba said, with that deadpan snark he was learning was universal: she didn’t believe him.

“He does,” Shinya shot, feeling like a kid whining that he couldn’t stay up past his bedtime. Just because the older kids could didn’t mean he could, and just because the older kids could didn’t mean it was good for them, but Kaoru was different. Kaoru wouldn’t use him and abandon him.

And… Kaoru had a girlfriend.

Every time he thought about it, it pissed him off and made him want to cry in equal measure. Kaoru had a girlfriend. Shinya didn’t have a chance. Kaoru was four years older and in college and was practically an adult; even if they wanted to be together, people would frown at the age difference.

It was four fucking years. What did it matter?

Futaba watched as he shoved himself back in his seat, still fuming. He could practically hear her arguments: it was just a crush, he’d get over it; Kaoru was just some creep who got off on kids—Shinya would punch her if she said that; Kaoru was anything but a creep—and had been steadily grooming him for years; the power dynamic would be so skewed any relationship they would have would be imbalanced. Kaoru would always be older, wiser, more mature.

But Kaoru was a goddamn giant dork who planned out his meals for the week and what he’d do on his days off and had been alone when Shinya met him. Alone, just like Shinya had been. That he’d been so annoyingly persistent about the mobile game and finding out what happened next that Shinya had rolled his eyes at his antics proved that he wasn’t any real danger.

He’d cried, too, at the end. When Prim was gone and the game was over and there was nothing left except whatever had built up between them, suddenly too solid and too real to be dismissed that easily.

“I can love who I want,” he told Futaba, half as a warning and half to convince himself. There was nothing wrong with Kaoru, but there was everything wrong with Shinya. There always had been. He’d drunk in the feel of Kaoru’s body heat, of his hands holding him tight, until he’d been giddy and cocky with it.

One day he might stop loving him, but that day wasn’t today.

“I can love who I want,” he said again, though his voice had dropped to a whisper. It was lost under the rumble of the dryers and the scratch of snow on the laundromat’s windows and the crunch as a pair of geezers came out of the bathhouse, bundled up like they’d never known winter before. How many years lay between them and their wives? Two? Four? Ten?

He was too tired to work through any more puzzles. He cradled his head in his arms, watched the shadows of snowflakes dance on the washers, and wished things could have been different, that nothing between them had changed.

* * *

Except things weren’t different, Shinya kept reminding himself. He was still trapped in an attic with nowhere to go, and despite promising Kaoru to stay put, he chafed all the next day, itching to get lost for a while in the back alleys. After school the bars opened up and the air stank of booze; Shinya tugged his scarf up higher and ducked his head, squinting against the sting.

There were groups of older men and women gathered in the tiny courtyards of apartment buildings, and Shinya eyed them, the words on the tip of his tongue: how old are you? How did you make it work? Does age really matter?

But he knew they’d laugh at him, or tell him not to worry about things like love and that his time was better spent studying, or that he was too young to understand.

Bullshit. He was fifteen. Okuma had an ex already. Half his classmates were dating.

And why was he so hung up on everyone else’s acceptance, anyway? Kaoru didn’t love him back. They’d never be anything more than friends. It didn’t matter how Shinya felt, and the thought pissed him off and spurred him back into wandering the alleys, at times following the crowds or moving against them. There were businessmen with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, faces red with alcohol and the chill in the air, complaining about bosses and wives and clients. There were college students, loud and boisterous, clinging to each other like the world might end if they let go, whining about professors and homework and their early-morning lectures. There was a pair of kids his age, standing on a corner, just chatting, glowering at the antics of everyone passing by.

Shinya stopped for moment to sip at a drink from a nearby vending machine. The kids greeted him quietly, but none of them spoke; it was better that way. Shinya didn’t want to be involved in their conversation, and they likely didn’t want an interloper eavesdropping—

With a shock he recognized Leblanc’s faded awning. He’d come full circle without even trying—but it had to be better than getting lost and having to call Futaba for directions.

Leblanc’s door opened, letting out a pair of bickering students. The surly teen next to Shinya muttered, “Great. It’s them again.”

His friend said, “Let’s just go, then. Nobody can complain that we’re hanging out if we study for a while, right?”

The surly kid groaned, but heaved himself off the wall he’d been leaning on and headed down the alley, toward the apartments. The pair of students had stopped right outside Leblanc—Shinya thought he recognized that hat, but couldn’t place where he’d seen it—when one of them turned, spotting him.

Okuma, with his hair bunched up under his hat, hands shoved into the pockets of his thick winter coat. Sakurazawa was in the middle of saying something but stopped with a yell as Okuma raced down the alley, grabbed Shinya by the arm, and dragged him off.

Shinya didn’t pay much attention to where they were going, just that they neared the station then ducked into a tiny, narrow alley and followed that down to the main street, then wandered aimlessly until Okuma got tired enough to stop. Shinya was still holding onto his drink. He took a sip.

“Uh,” he said. “Can I have my arm back?”

Okuma let go. Shinya stared at the wrinkles around his elbow and hoped they’d straighten out on their own.

“I didn’t know you were talking to Sakurazawa again,” he said.

Okuma made a pained noise in the back of his throat. “Talking, right,” he muttered, then took his hat off to grip at his hair. “He wants me to tell everybody else. Like hell I’m doing that. It’s hard enough already. What the fuck am I supposed to do if this follows me into high school?”

“Isn’t it going to anyway?”

“You even sound like him,” Okuma said, finding a wall to lean on and sagging against it. His voice went low and mocking. “‘You gotta say it, man. Hiding it will just give people a reason to talk. Do you wanna live the rest of your life like this?’” He groaned. “Uh, no, I don’t, but I don’t have much choice, do I? What will people say about him when he hangs out with me? How has he not thought of that?”

“Maybe he doesn’t care,” Shinya offered.

Okuma groaned again. He scrubbed his face with his hands, then stared up at the sky—cloudy, as it had been for days, promising rain or snow or both. “He keeps saying that anyone who minds doesn’t matter, but I just—I don’t want to be hated, and that’s what’ll happen. I’ll be the freak. I don’t want that.”

“Who does?” Not even Kaoru wanted to be hated, he thought. Shinya hadn’t minded when he was in elementary school, hadn’t minded throughout his whole middle school career, but… indifference was better than hatred. Shinya would rather have classmates who didn’t care what happened to him than ones who celebrated his misfortune.

Then he thought of the notes on his handouts. It still felt weird, seeing that someone other than his handful of friends cared.

“But,” Shinya said, watching people go by, “I think I’d rather have friends who supported me than ones I’d have to watch myself around. Think about it—you’re gay, and you hide it, and Higuchi or whatever his name is keeps trying to set you up on blind dates with girls, or keeps talking about how he can’t wait until he has a girlfriend, or he keeps saying you’d feel better if you got one. But that’s not you, and that’s not what you want.”

Okuma snorted. “Look at Mr. Sophisticated over here, giving me friendship advice. I have more friends than you do, you know.”

“At least I don’t lie to mine,” Shinya shot back.

“Oh,” Okuma said. “So polo guy knows, then? That you like him?”

“Yeah.”

He could still see it: Kaoru’s hands, reaching out across the couch; the soup left to chill on the table; the broken, confused look on his face as Shinya told him not to touch him.

Look how long that lasted.

The same tired arguments came to mind, but Shinya didn’t voice them. Instead he said, “I couldn’t just not tell him. He deserved to know. Whether or not anything changes now will be up to him.” He scuffed a shoe on the sidewalk. A woman wearing strong perfume clicked by in her heels, and his nose itched. “I don’t know if I want anything to change. I don’t want him to break up with his girlfriend for me, but I don’t know if I can stay just friends with him, either. I like him, but I want him to be happy even if he’s not with me.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Okuma said. He looked at Shinya out of the corner of his eye, appraising. “Didn’t you see the way he acted when we sprung you? Like you’d disappear if he so much as acknowledged you were there? That’s not exactly happy behavior.”

Shinya flushed under his layers. “I told you, he’s just like that.”

“With _you_ , maybe,” Okuma said.

“We’re the only friends we have.”

“If he seriously thought you were just his friend…” Okuma started to say, but trailed off.

Of course they were just friends. Of course they couldn’t be anything more. Kaoru might care for him, but he didn’t love Shinya the same way.

Shinya had to wonder: would that be the wedge that caused them to drift apart? Would that be better for them both in the long run?

“Well, whatever,” Okuma said, dropping the subject. “If he likes you, he likes you. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. What are you going to do about school? I’ve heard if you miss any more classes you might get held back.”

Oddly grateful for the shift, Shinya said, “Then I’ll just go.”

“Would that be safe? What about your mom?”

“She doesn’t have to know.” Would the school keep quiet about it if he said things were more complicated than they thought? Would they push him to reconcile? He was already screwed over, anyway; there was no way he’d be getting into high school next year.

“They might tell her.”

“Then they tell her,” he said, finishing his drink. “Nothing I can do about that. I’m tired of hiding. It feels like I’m running away, like I’ve done something bad. Like I’m a criminal or something.”

“Don’t you have other family you can stay with? Someone who won’t pull this shit with you?”

Shinya shook his head; Okuma furrowed his brows, and they both stared at the street. Everyone going by was older than them, in suits and coats, holding briefcases. Some were drunk, some were tired, and everyone dragged their feet. Shinya said, “My mom’s all I have. I don’t even know if I have any other family somewhere, but I don’t want to look, either. If there really is no one, what good would it do me to find that out?”

“That’s pretty sad, Oda,” Okuma said, fluffing up his bangs.

“And if there is someone, and they don’t want me? If they’ve—I don’t know—disowned my mom for one reason or another and don’t give a damn about her or her son? What good would that do?”

Okuma sucked in a breath. “You should try,” he said.

“Why?”

“You just should.” He was frowning at his hair as he said it. “You should find out. Then you’ll know—if you have family, if they want to see you, if they want you around.” He dropped his voice. “You can’t go back to that woman. She’ll lock you up again. We might not be able to get you back out.”

They definitely wouldn’t. Shinya’s mom was entering some new low, even for her, and Shinya wanted no part of it. Let her flounder on her own.

But she’d taken care of him for years. Her, by herself, with no one to help. If Shinya had family, wouldn’t they have stepped in? Wouldn’t they have called, or written letters? Wouldn’t he have had some sign that someone else out there was thinking about him?

“Yeah,” he said. “You might not. But things can’t stay like this. I can’t squat in some attic for the rest of my life. I can’t stay afraid. Something has to be done, and I have to do it.”

Because no one else would. Because there was no one else. Because Shinya was her whole world, and he knew what it was like to lose that.

Okuma stared at him. “You really do love her, don’t you? Despite everything she’s done.”

Shinya nodded. He could hate her behavior, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t change. She’d been kind and well-meaning, once. She’d tried her best to give him what he needed. When had she started to change? When had she shifted into what she was today?

If only he’d paid more attention, maybe he’d know—or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he wasn’t meant to.

“Well!” Okuma said, straightening. “Well—we’ll figure something out. At least let us help you. We’re your friends, aren’t we?”

A month ago, he would have questioned who this ‘we’ was. He had a handful of friends, at best, all of them older than him. But now—the messages on his notes, Sakurazawa stopping by Leblanc to see him even if Okuma wasn’t there, Okuma himself always bringing his packet of handouts—now things were different. Maybe being friends wasn’t the deep connection he’d always thought it was.

“Yeah,” Shinya said. “You are.”

* * *

Kaoru searched through the rest of his clothes, eager to find just one more jacket that didn’t quite fit anymore and coming up empty. The pile on the bed was already big enough, but it was Shinya—and Leblanc’s attic was more than a little chilly. He needed to keep warm.

He still needed a bunch of other things, so Kaoru was packing him another bag—although he was having a hard time finding anything in the depths of his closet aside from an old pair of sneakers Kaoru didn’t wear. He’d grown out of them too quickly to really break them in, and everything else he pulled out fit.

He hauled the pile up into his arms and turned at a creak by his door. “Dad,” he said, noticing the man standing just outside the doorway. “You could have said something.”

Dad grunted, eyeing the pile. “Those for the kid?”

“He has a name, you know,” Kaoru reminded him. “And no. They still fit, but I was thinking I could wash them again, make sure they don’t smell like mothballs or whatever.”

Dad grumbled something indecipherable before clearing his throat. “When ya got ‘em in the wash, there’s something I wanna talk to ya about.”

“Oh, sure.” Though he sounded calm, Kaoru’s pulse began to race: those words in that tone of voice was never a good combination. Was he going to ask Kaoru to get a part-time job? Was he going to ask him to move out? Was he going to ask him not to hang out with Shinya anymore?

He could hear it already: “That kid ain’t doin’ nothin’ for ya. He’s too young. Cut him off, Kaoru.”

But that was all stupid, he thought as he dumped the pile in the wash and added soap and fabric softener. It was stupid because Dad would never say those things—minus the job part. He claimed Kaoru had a college fund, but Kaoru hadn’t seen a cent of it so far—unless that was where he was getting the money for books and lab fees.

Kaoru shook his head. Dad wouldn’t drop a bombshell like this on him out of the blue. Whatever it was, all Kaoru had to do was listen and acknowledge and then they could plan.

He still had to steel himself walking out of the bathroom.

Dad took one look at his face and said, “It ain’t nothin’ bad, Kaoru.”

“If you say so,” Kaoru said, taking his usual seat on the couch. Dad started working at fifteen. He probably thought his only son was a lazy, good-for-nothing bum, sitting around at home and going off to school and wasting time with his friends—

He shook his head again. Where were these thoughts coming from? Dad would never. Dad had already said he was proud of him for getting so far. If Kaoru wanted to drop out and learn to take over Untouchable, Dad wouldn’t complain.

“You alright there?”

“Just nervous,” Kaoru said, foregoing an explanation of his spiraling thoughts. “What’s—um, what’s this about?”

Dad set something on the coffee table: a note with a pin shoved through it, keeping it closed. He took a breath and said, “Was thinkin’ ‘bout givin’ these to the kid. Take a look.”

Kaoru picked them up. The pin was a golden gecko, its tail curling around one of its hind legs. He worked the note open, read it over, and said, “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You want—Shinya?”

“You don’t?”

“I do, but…” It was a bit much, if he was being honest. Dad never looked like the type to enjoy other’s company, much less a teenager’s, and he wanted two of them now?

He looked at the note again. Dad might as well have signed an adoption paper with this kind of note; there was no way Shinya would say no. He had no reason to.

That was why, he thought. It wasn’t as if Shinya had much of choice one way or another; he could accept Dad’s proposal, be adopted, and live the rest of his life out happily, or he could go back with his mother, and there was no way he would ever choose that.

Dad sighed and ran a hand over his hair. “You think he won’t, then.”

“No, I think he will,” Kaoru said. “It’s just—what other choice does he have?”

That made Dad laugh. “It ain’t like I’ve got paperwork all filled out ‘n ready for him ta sign, Kaoru,” he said. He looked back at the pin, at the note. “But he should know that no matter what, we got his back. You ‘n me both. And it ain’t like I’m askin’ him outright to join the family; I’m just sayin’ he’s a part of it, whether he’s an Oda or not.”

“Still,” Kaoru said, just for something to say. The unease that had settled in his gut refused to budge. Maybe because the pin felt very… final. If Shinya rejected it—and Kaoru doubted he would—that would be a blow to Dad’s pride, to Kaoru’s fantasies of the future. Shinya with a proper place at the table and his shoes by the door and his things scattered around the apartment. Late nights where they’d be able to stay awake until long after the last train left for the night watching movies or playing games or doing nothing. Waking up to Shinya at the table, blearily downing eggs and toast. Kaoru liked to sleep in tank tops and t-shirts—he had them sitting around in his closet, and he might as well have found a use for them after he’d stopped wearing them outside—and Shinya would get an eyeful of his birthmark, twisting up the side of his neck, not unlike the gecko tattooed on Dad’s skin.

“Come on, Kaoru. Talk to me,” Dad said, breaking him out of his thoughts.

“I’d like it,” he admitted. “I’d like it—a lot, honestly. There’s no way he’d say no, even if he wasn’t on the run from his mother. But—he told me he loves me. I don’t know if he could stand living here, with us, while he has those feelings.”

It would be like parading cake around a diabetic, Kaoru thought. They’d want it, they’d crave it, and they’d always have to avoid it. Shinya might say yes, then realize how out of reach Kaoru still was. It might hurt him.

Kaoru didn’t want that.

“The other day, you said you might love him back.”

“And I might,” Kaoru said. It wasn’t enough to want to hold him, though. It wouldn’t be fair to Shinya or his feelings. “But my love and his love—they’re different. You know what I mean.”

Dad shifted, glanced out the window—darkness, whole and complete. When had it gotten so late? “And ya told him that?”

“I don’t want to get his hopes up.”

“Maybe you already are,” Dad said, scratching at the back of his head again. “People’re complicated. I never thought I’d wanna be a dad until I took you in, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Kaoru said.

“And you didn’t think the kid would wanna be friends with ya until it happened, right?”

“That was a coincidence.” It was also all stubbornness on Kaoru’s part. The game was—not the best, but he’d liked the story and couldn’t find it on any of the app stores, and Shinya had taken to wandering around Untouchable’s alley—

“Uh-huh, sure.” Dad snorted. “It had nothin’ to do with you guys scarin’ away all my customers by hangin’ out in front of my shop, arguin’.”

“We weren’t that bad. Untouchable barely gets customers as it is.”

“And whose fault is that, huh?”

Kaoru shook his head. Maybe it was their fault—but maybe it was also the location, and the seedy look of some of the customers—but the die-hard gun nerds and survival game enthusiasts never let a pair of dumb kids stop them from getting through the door. It wasn’t as if they’d parked themselves in front of it.

He shook his head again. There was that feeling in his chest—nostalgia, warm and soothing, as he thought of the past and how simple everything had been back then.

Now everything was complicated. Shinya loved him, and Kaoru might or might not love him back, and Kaoru was a college student, for God’s sake—much too old to be considering dating a middle school student. People would stare.

People had always stared.

And they always would, he realized. They would stare at his birthmark and at him holding hands with a boy. They would stare at Shinya’s brilliant smile when he graced them with its presence. They would stare at Dad, barely forty but with kids half his age. They would stare and they would whisper but none of them would ever come close to guessing the truth.

Kaoru folded the note up and carefully pinned the pin back into place. Shinya would love it, and he knew it. It would be like having a piece of Dad and Kaoru with him all the time, no matter where he went.

“I’ll talk to him about it,” he promised, and Dad nodded.

Whether it was the right thing to do or not, Kaoru would see it through.

* * *

Futaba got Shinya in contact with an uncle in some small town up north. That the man was surprised to hear from him was an understatement—he couldn’t believe Shinya was really his nephew until he mentioned an offhand comment his mom had made one day about the wildflowers she would always pass by on the way to school, and how there weren’t any on the streets of Tokyo.

So he’d asked for some time, and Shinya had more than enough time to give, and a couple days after his conversation with Okuma he was heading back to school with a bag full of the handouts he’d managed to complete.

That the teachers were surprised to see him was also an understatement. Only Mr. Mori hid his shock well enough, and Shinya prepared for the worst.

But the worst didn’t come. A week went by, then two; Shinya got another call from his uncle and endured his rambling for an hour or two, struggling his way through his homework, the smell of curry spices so strong around him that he could practically taste it.

(Higuchi, like the asshole Shinya thought he was, complained that he stank to high heaven. He was quickly shut up by the rest of the class. Shinya could hardly believe it was happening.)

Sometimes Futaba and the part-timer were there; other times it was just the old man down in the cafe, listening to the TV drone on as he did crossword puzzles. Tonight it was him and a dark-haired older woman Shinya recognized as Futaba’s mother, chatting quietly at the bar.

“So,” his uncle finally said, having told Shinya all about his hometown, his daughter, and his wife’s obsession with Korean pop bands, “what brought this up out of the blue? I can’t believe that she’d mention us after the way she left.”

“The way she left?” Shinya asked.

“Well, yes,” his uncle said. “It was one of those—those high school romances. She was completely head-over-heels for this young man, and he for her. But he had these dreams of going of Tokyo and becoming a musician—a rock star, I think—and she wouldn’t listen to any of us telling her how hard it would be for him to make a living that way. Our parents were especially adamant about it. They told her all she needed to do was stay here and help with the business and she would find someone better; I think that’s when they started planning to leave. They packed their bags and were on a train to Tokyo the day they graduated. I can’t even be sure she went to college or not.”

Shinya wasn’t quite sure, either. He’d never heard her talk about it. She never spoke much of the past.

“And I know he didn’t make it in show business,” his uncle went on. “Never heard of him, not even here, and you know we’d be the first to jump on that particular wagon. How are they, by the way?”

“Um,” Shinya said, searching desperately for an answer. He’d never heard of his father, either. As far as he knew, the man was living peacefully as far away from his former wife as possible. As far as he knew, the man was still alive. Probably. Maybe.

“It’s just me and mom,” he settled for. “She doesn’t talk about—about my dad much. Or at all. Or, uh, ever.”

“Oh,” the man sighed. Shinya knew what he was thinking: that clearly the young man his mom had been so enamored with she left home for had left her on her lonesome. It didn’t matter how. “Oh, I can only imagine what she must be going through,” the man continued. “She was so in love with him. It must have broken her heart right in two.”

“Yeah,” Shinya said.

“Is Hanae there? Can I speak to her?”

“She’s not here, no,” he said. “She’s, um. She’s—we’re—”

“Fighting,” the man guessed.

At least he didn’t have to say it. Shinya sighed, sitting back and abandoning his homework. “Kind of. She’s been acting weird lately, and doing a bunch of weird stuff, too.”

“Weird, hm?”

“Yeah,” he said, and pulled his lip between his teeth. “Was she like this when she was younger?”

His uncle hummed. “Hard to tell. Kids are strange sometimes, and there was never much to do here. We were all our own brand of strange.” His tone turned serious. “Why? What’s she done? It must be something concerning if you felt the need to contact me.”

A light pattering on rain started up on the window. Between that and the monotonous drone from the TV, he could be easily drowned out—and besides, the owner and the woman knew what happened. So he laid it out: the dream, his mom breaking into his room, how she’d locked him inside for weeks on end, only letting him out for a quick meal and a bath when she was home. He pulled his jacket tighter, pretending it was Kaoru.

It was a rather poor substitute, but it was all he had.

And as he talked about not wanting to go back—as he mentioned the missing gifts Kaoru had given him, and the missing computer cords, and the mess she’d made of his room three years ago—silence settled in around him, despite the noise. It was a heavy thing, weighed down with expectation. If Shinya could do nothing except run and hope he wouldn’t be caught, then it was up to one adult or another to help him, wasn’t it? If Shinya could trust Okuma—if he could trust his class—then he could trust one single adult, couldn’t he?

… Couldn’t he?

His uncle hummed some more once he was done. He was mumbling something to himself, the words turning to static as he got up and paced on the other end.

“I don’t want to leave her,” Shinya said, when he thought he caught the words _no, he can’t stay there_ , “but—what else can I do? She’s just getting worse. I don’t know how to help her—I don’t know if I _should_ help her! Nothing I’ve ever said to her gets through. She doesn’t listen to me. She doesn’t listen to anyone.”

His uncle muttered something that sounded like, “Yeah, that sounds like Hanae.”

“So she _has_ always been this way?”

He sucked in a breath, then let it out. “Not all the time, no. But when she sets her mind to something, she’s the type that’ll dig her heels in the harder you try to shake her off it. Stubborn as an ass. Never thought any of us would be right. …Well, maybe she has always been like this. And with a family as big as ours, she might’ve felt a bit unloved, or that she was getting left out. God knows the rest of us did.”

Shinya blinked. “There are more of you?”

“There were five of us kids, including your mother,” his uncle told him. “Me and her, we were the middle children. We took love from whoever would give it. Maybe that’s why she ran off with that rock star wannabe; he said he loved her and she wanted it to be true. Maybe it was. But it didn’t last.”

“No, it didn’t,” Shinya said. His father wasn’t in any of the photos his mom hung on the wall; he wasn’t in any of Shinya’s earliest memories, either. But he’d existed. Someone had loved his mom and then left her and broke her heart, and maybe all of this was just the long, eventual fallout.

His uncle groaned under his breath. “For what it’s worth, Shinya, I’m sorry that we had to meet like this. I finally learn I have another nephew and it’s because he needs help. What a damned world we live in.”

“I didn’t know I had anybody,” Shinya said.

“And I don’t know if she planned it that way,” his uncle said, and groaned again. “I don’t—I suppose I never knew anything about her at all. Not really. But who does? It’s not as if we can read each other’s minds. Real life isn’t a cartoon. It’s not that convenient. I’ll—I’ll try and see if there’s anything I can do from my end, for now. But that’s not an environment you should go back to if you can’t help it. Are you staying with someone?”

He was staying in a dingy cafe attic, but his uncle wouldn’t want to hear that. “Yeah.” he said, and rattled off Mr. Iwai’s address. Hopefully the man would cover for him for a while.

When he finally hung up and went upstairs, the attic had gotten even colder. He changed out of his uniform and into his new, comfortable clothes and one of the jackets Kaoru had given him; it was one of the ones Shinya hadn’t washed, out of some weird, juvenile hope that it would still smell like Kaoru. When he pressed the sleeve to his nose, yes, there was Kaoru’s laundry detergent, and the faint twang of aftershave, and the discordant scent of flowers from his soap.

All Shinya could think was that it smelled like home.


	6. The Consultation, Part Three

When Kaoru arrived home late one night, Dad was on the phone. This wasn’t unusual—sometimes one of his old yakuza buddies called him up to chat, and sometimes he was confirming orders for Untouchable, the shop’s forms and inventory spread out on the table. Why he had to do that at home and near midnight, Kaoru wanted to know—Dad was a big believer in leaving work at the shop door, and watching him bring some of it back felt like a blow.

So Kaoru was surprised when, as he padded into the kitchen for a drink, Dad waved him over. “Looks like he just got back, so I’ll confirm everything with him, then get back to you,” Dad said to the guy on the phone, and nodded. “Right, yeah. Tomorrow, then. Night.”

He huffed out a sigh, leaning back in his chair and tossing his phone on the table.

“Uh,” Kaoru said.

“Shinya’s uncle’s gonna be pressing charges against his ma for abuse,” Dad said, without preamble. Some people would call him blunt; Kaoru, for once, would agree. “He’s calling up everybody Shinya told him about, but since you’re still a minor, he’s gotta go through me first. He wants to know if you can get the kid to talk to child services.”

“Uh, probably,” Kaoru said, taking a seat on the couch.

Dad looked at him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Oh, no, it’s just…” How was he supposed to explain it? “I just didn’t expect him to have any family, that’s all.”

“Any family, or any family who cared?”

“Both, I guess,” Kaoru said. Logic stated that no one was ever really alone: mothers and fathers had brothers and sisters, and their mothers and fathers had brothers and sisters, all the way down the line. Logic told him that even if there weren’t any aunts or uncles, there would be great-aunts, cousins three times removed, that one brother no one talked about who moved to America. There was always someone.

And yet an uncle—Shinya’s uncle—left him flabbergasted. It defied all reason: Shinya wasn’t some cast-off child, left abandoned and wanting answers for who he was and which family he really belonged to but didn’t want him. Shinya had a mother, who had a mother herself, who had to have had other children. Shinya wasn’t as alone in the world as he thought.

A tiny part of Kaoru was jealous. A bigger part of him was relieved.

“It’s good that he has someone he can turn to,” Kaoru said, picking words out of the jumble of feelings running through his mind. “Someone who will fight for him, someone the state has to listen to. I think it would be worse if he didn’t have anyone. I think it would be even worse if his uncle didn’t care. But I’d also be lying if I said I’m not a bit jealous. He has family. I—I only have you.”

He’d never know the rest of his family. He’d never know if he had aunts or uncles or siblings of his own. Dad’s parents had both died of cancer years before Kaoru had come into his life. It had just been them, for as long as he could remember.

“I know I’m lucky,” he said, before Dad could say anything. “I know I am. I could have wound up in the system, or with some other clan member. I could have been indoctrinated before I was thirteen. Instead I got you, and you’re the best Dad ever—but I just—”

He just wished he had more. More love, more everything—and he choked on it, on his own selfishness and the tears burning in his eyes and the way Dad was looking at him. Pitying and self-reproaching all at once, because he knew, too.

Dad asked, “What do you want to do, then? Do you want to find your family? The clan could find ‘em in a heartbeat.”

Kaoru shook his head, dabbing at the tears leaking out of his eyes. It was too late for him to find his family. It was definitely too late for the clan to do anything—if they were going to do it now, they could have done it years ago. Kaoru could already be with his family, whether they wanted him or not.

“No,” he said, “I like it here with you. I just—you know, I can’t help but think, sometimes, of what could have happened. Of the what-ifs. How different would my life be, if only this one thing hadn’t happened, or something else had taken its place. That’s all.”

“That ain’t all,” Dad said, insistent.

“Maybe not, but.” Kaoru laughed. He couldn’t help it. “But it’s true. Everybody does it—what would they do differently, if they knew how things would turn out. “But you never gave me a reason to think that I had blood family out there. I never thought anyone could love me more than you did. So I don’t care if I have family out there or not—they won’t be you, which means they won’t be family. Who else would get my birthmark tattooed on their neck? Who else would tell me not to mind what everybody says because they don’t really know me? You did. Not anybody else.”

Although Shinya liked to scowl at his polo shirts and turtlenecks. Kaoru had grown to like them, despite how stuffy they felt at times. They were the reason he liked the colder months: no one looked twice at a turtleneck sweater when it got chilly out, and this time of year, when everyone preferred to stay inside where it was warm rather than bundle on layers to brave the cold, made him no different from anyone else. Not even Emi had seen his birthmark.

Dad was staring at him again, looking as if he was sure if he stared long enough he’d see through to the heart of the matter. Kaoru very carefully didn’t look at the gray streaks in his hair and said, “I mean it. Even if my birth mother came back looking for me, I wouldn’t go with her. You mean more to me than she does. You always will.”

You and Shinya, he didn’t say, but Dad had to know that.

But there was still lingering doubt in Dad’s eyes. Kaoru thought hard on how to displace it, then realized he couldn’t. Not really. Like his insecurities about his birthmark, whatever doubts Dad harbored would never really leave; they would only linger, hovering in the back of his mind, pushed aside and overlooked but resurfacing on some rainy day when he had nothing to do but think.

So Kaoru said, “You’re the one who raised me. Not her. I can wish all I want for a family to call my own, for a mom who might love me, but I don’t need it. Not when I have you. No matter what, I want you to know that. Okay?”

Dad sat back, this time staring out the window. He shook his head and gave another faint laugh. “Listen to you, you punk. Didn’t I say just th’ other day nothin’ you did could make me any less proud of you? So you don’t need to be sittin’ around tellin’ me you’re fine and happy the way you are now. Family—truth is, I woulda given you back to ‘em if they’d come lookin’, all those years ago. But nobody did, and all I saw was this kid who had nobody who wanted him. I’d lost mine, and that shit hurt. I told myself I’d be that damn kid’s family.” Dad looked back to him, and tapped the side of his neck, where the gecko tattoo rested. “Years and years later, we are each other’s family, and we’ll tell each other that however many times we gotta.”

He looked like he wanted to say more, but stopped. Kaoru waited, and eventually he added, “And the kid, too. I learned in the clan it’s the ones that stick by you thick and thin that’re your family, and that damn kid—he’s seen the absolute worst and it hasn’t driven him away. He’s an Iwai, if he wants to be.”

“I can’t imagine he’d say no,” Kaoru said, thinking of how often Shinya had been over in the last two years. They’d spent holidays together, and birthdays, and nearly every waking moment some days. Shinya was happier here than he was anywhere else.

But Kaoru hadn’t given him the pin yet. He was sure there was a right moment for it, but it didn’t seem to be now.

Dad nodded. “Me neither, kid.” Then he sighed. “But who knows, now. Maybe his uncle won’t want him talkin’ to us anymore. He might hafta move, too.”

“He might?” Kaoru had to wonder how much it would hurt to lose Shinya like that, but— “If it means he’s safe, away from his mom, then I don’t see how it’s a bad thing. It’s not like his uncle will take his phone away, either. He’ll still be able to call.”

It would be more than his mother had done, leaving him locked in his room with no way to contact the outside save for balls of paper dropped from a window. He hadn’t even been given his handouts from school. Okuma had been doing all that work for nothing.

 _Don’t say that_ , he told himself. Okuma being responsible was the reason they’d met. It was the reason Shinya was out of there, away from his mother.

Kaoru licked his lips, mouth dry. He’d never gotten that drink.

“Kaoru,” Dad said, and Kaoru looked up from the table. “We’ll do what we can on our end, alright, but he’s gotta come through, too, if he wants anythin’ to change. We can say we’re concerned ‘til we’re blue in the face but it won’t matter if he doesn’t step up and says he wants help. He’ll listen to ya. Just run it by him, okay?”

Kaoru was sure Shinya would listen. If he thought life with his mother couldn’t get worse, he wouldn’t have found family to try and bail him out. He’d still be concerned with trying to make his mother understand that he was a person, not a pet or a toddler to be locked up for his own protection.

But Kaoru could be there when he asked for help from now on. Kaoru could be— _should_ be—right by his side, ready and willing to be leaned on.

Prim hadn’t been alone. Not entirely.

“Okay,” he said.

* * *

Shinya stared at the building—all glass windows and steel framing, the street reflected back at him. He’d been prepared for something intimidating, like the concrete and marble courthouses he saw on TV. What he got was sleek and modern and his meek reflection. He was so small next to Kaoru.

In the glass, Shinya took Kaoru’s hand. In his palm, Shinya felt warmth.

“It doesn’t have to be today,” Kaoru said.

“Yes, it does,” Shinya said. Okuma waved from a cafe across the street, and Shinya caught himself waving back and shoved his free hand in his pocket. “If we don’t do it today, she might gain some leverage. If she gets tipped off, she might clean the apartment up.”

“You don’t think she’s done it already?”

Shinya shook his head. It was surprisingly easy to picture his mom pacing the apartment, trying to figure out where he’d gone, leaving everything the same so she could lock him back in again when she finally dragged him back home. She was stubborn like that.

“Unless she’s already trashed the place out of rage, I don’t think so,” he said, and went into the building. He let Kaoru talk to the receptionist, sure that they’d given off the wrong impression walking in holding hands, but if she was disgusted, she hid it well.

As they sat in the waiting room—the chairs were probably the most comfortable ones he’d ever sat in—he asked, “And you’re sure we’re expected?”

“That’s what Dad said,” Kaoru told him.

Shinya could hardly believe they hadn’t been kicked out of the building, child services or not. There weren’t any people waiting with them, either, which felt strange—weren’t there always people waiting in places like this? How had Mr. Iwai managed to get them an appointment in less than an hour?

 _Don’t think about it_ , Shinya told himself.

He wondered what his mom was doing.

_Don’t think about that, either._

He and Kaoru wound up watching shitty daytime TV while they waited—talk shows and soap operas and talk shows that were soap operas—and the room was warm. Shinya was ready to fall asleep by the time someone came out to get them, and ready to bolt out the door by the time they were seated in another, smaller room in the back. He and Kaoru sat on one side of a plain metal table, and the pair of investigators on the other. One was an uptight woman in an ugly pink suit, her mouth pressed into a thin line; the other was an older man, the beginnings of gray in his hair, with laugh lines around his mouth. A folder sat on the table, thin and new. **Oda** , read the tab on the side.

Shinya froze.

The older man introduced them—Shinya thought he caught their names but quickly found them slipping away with nerves—and they passed business cards across the table. Shinya stared at them long enough that Kaoru took them and shoved them in his pocket; the uptight woman’s frown deepened.

“I understand that this must be hard for you,” the older man said. “Not many can come forth like this. You’re very brave, Oda.”

“You’ve already heard?” Kaoru asked.

“His uncle spoke with us just a couple of days ago,” they were informed. “He said he’d been called up by a nephew he didn’t know existed. He said he was worried for your safety, Oda. He asked if we could check up on you and your mother. Imagine our surprise when we heard you wanted to come talk to us yourself.”

The woman folded her hands on the table. Her nails were as gaudy as her suit. Shinya couldn’t believe red came in such ugly colors.

She was sizing them up, like he’d thought the receptionist would do. She’d seen them holding hands and she hated it; that was why she looked like she swallowed a lemon.

She said, “You look awfully stuffy in those coats. Why not take them off? We may be a while.”

“Oh,” Kaoru said, glancing at Shinya. “Well, sure.”

She nodded. “I’ll make us some tea.”

She left; Shinya and Kaoru shucked off their coats and scarves and hats, draping them over an extra chair.

“I suppose now’s a good time to ask if it’s alright for us to record this,” the man said, producing a tape recorder and setting it on the table. “We’ll need something for evidence to present to a judge, if it comes to that. We hope it won’t.”

Shinya nodded. Kaoru nudged him. “You have to say it’s okay, Shinya.”

“It’s fine,” Shinya mumbled, and the older man gave him a smile and turned it on. He couldn’t help but eye the folder again. “Um—what did my uncle say, exactly? I don’t want to tell you stuff you already know.”

“We’re here to hear your side of it,” the man said. “As much as you’re willing to tell.”

As much as he wanted to say? They could be here all night, then. Shinya could go on for hours about everything his mom did—not just to him but to Kaoru, too.

The woman came back with tea and bottles of water for each of them, settling herself in her chair, noting that the recorder was still going. He heard the sharp hiss of breath as she noticed his ears.

“Easy, now,” the man said. “But it’s a good starting point. Could you tell us what happened to your ears, Oda?”

“Oh,” he said, hands already wrapped around a bottle. His foot quested for Kaoru’s under the table. “My mom cuts them whenever she cuts my hair. I thought she was just bad at it at first, but it’s been two years.”

It was easy from there. Distressingly so, as if once the floodgates had been opened Shinya couldn’t stop the torrent. He’d thought he was normal, up until the year he’d met Prim and Kaoru and realized he wasn’t and hadn’t been for years. Once that thought was lodged in his mind, he couldn’t shake it loose. His mom gradually becoming more and more unhinged didn’t help things, but he’d shrugged it off as work stress. She was always stressed. He was always the only one around to hear about it.

He still remembered coming home to his trashed room, his summer homework torn to pieces, Kaoru promising to help him tape it back together. He still remembered throwing shit around the kitchen, breaking plates and smearing food across the floor, and his mom’s first reaction was to find someone to blame. He’d wanted her to be mad at him—then when she was, he wished she wouldn’t.

Like the day she’d broken into his room.

“Broke in?” the woman questioned.

“We put a lock on the door over one of our vacations, when she wasn’t home,” Kaoru admitted. “Shinya told me she was going through his things. Looking at his homework, rummaging through his drawers, flipping through books. So he wanted to lock it, to keep her out.”

“She wasn’t taking anything?”

Shinya shrugged. “I don’t have much. Just clothes and some books and an old computer I never used. I thought she was using it, but she had a laptop I’d see her use to pay the bills, sometimes. We didn’t give her a key.”

“My dad always asks if he can come in,” Kaoru told them, “but she couldn’t give him that. We thought a lock might help her realize that he’s not a kid she can barge in on anymore, and she didn’t, for a while.”

“For a few months. Almost a year,” Shinya said.

“So, what changed?” the woman asked. “What could have happened that she would turn around and decide to break in?”

Shinya sagged in his chair. Kaoru’s leg, pressed into his, was warm. Reassuring. He couldn’t remember if he’d told Kaoru why his mom had broken in, just that she had. “I had a dream,” he said. “I must’ve been talking in my sleep, and she heard it, somehow. When I woke up she was there. She kinda looked like you do right now, all sour and disapproving,” he told the woman.

She pursed her lips even more.

“She told me to leave for school, but it was New Year’s Eve,” he went on. “I thought she forgot I was out on break since she had to work. When I got back I found out she’d switched the lock on my door. She locked me in there for weeks.”

That got the woman’s attention. “Without food or water?”

Shinya nodded, then remembered the recorder. “Yeah. She’d let me out in the morning for breakfast and to use the bathroom, and then again when she got home. I had nothing to do while I was waiting for her, either. She threw out almost everything I had.”

All the books Kaoru had given or loaned him. The little gachapon prizes tucked away in a drawer. The cords to his computer.

“And you couldn’t contact anyone?” the man asked.

“She had my phone and the cords to my computer, so I was throwing sheets of paper out the window,” Shinya said, aware of how strange he must have seemed to be littering. “Not like anybody came by to see what it was about, anyway.”

He scowled, shaking his head. Kaoru reached over and gripped his hand under the table, and he realized he was shaking at the memory. He realized she had always terrified him, with all her talks of winning and losing and what was right or wrong. They hadn’t had a proper conversation in years.

 _It’s normal to be scared_ , Shinya thought. It was something he’d read online somewhere: parents were supposed to protect. They were supposed to ensure that their children grew up healthy and strong. When they didn’t, it was normal to be scared.

“Um, so,” Kaoru said, “can you do anything with that, or do you need more?”

“Well,” said the man, after a glance at Shinya that he didn’t like one bit. It was too pitying. The last thing he wanted was pity. “If we need anything else, we’ll be in touch. This should be enough for now, but if you remember anything else, Oda, let us know.”

“Yeah,” Shinya said. He was glad when they were bundled up and out the door, back on the icy-cold street where night had fallen while they talked. Okuma wasn’t at the cafe where they’d left him, and as they walked down the street, Kaoru’s hand jammed in with his own in his pocket, Shinya asked, “How many more times am I gonna have to tell it?”

“As many times as you have to, I guess,” Kaoru said, swiping his thumb across the back of Shinya’s hand. Shinya shivered from more than just the chill wind creeping in through the holes in his scarf.

“I wish it could just be over,” Shinya said.

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Kaoru told him.

“Doesn’t mean I can’t wish it to be.”

They continued down the icy sidewalk. It was starting to mist up again, something fine that froze on everything it touched. Shinya tugged his hat down lower. “I guess now’s a bad time to ask if you’re really okay with all this,” he said. “Helping me. Holding my hand. Listening to Okuma all the time.”

“He’s not that bad,” Kaoru said, and Shinya wondered what they’d gotten up to during those two weeks he’d been locked in his room to get so chummy so fast. Maybe that was just how Okuma was. “And I like helping you and holding your hand. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t keep doing it.”

“But you’ve got a girlfriend,” Shinya reminded him, though it was more to remind himself: he could hold Kaoru’s hand, and they could hug, but in the end all they would be was friends. Kaoru wasn’t interested in him like that.

Kaoru rubbed at some water licking its way down his neck and said, “Actually, we broke up. She’ll be swamped with work next semester and she’s trying to get into an exchange program. She said it wouldn’t be fair to me to make me wait around for her.”

Shinya froze; Kaoru kept walking, almost tugging their hands out of Shinya’s pocket. “You _broke up_?”

“Yeah,” Kaoru said.

“But, I—you—you can’t just break up!”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he snapped, fishing for a reason. Because this way Shinya could enjoy what they had without wishing it could be anything more. Because this way he could move on faster. Because, barely a month after learning he had a girlfriend in the first place, after spending all that time sulking about it, they weren’t together anymore.

Kaoru waited—he always waited—but when Shinya couldn’t find an answer that wasn’t selfish, he said, “Is it because you might start to think I love you back?”

With his head turned, Shinya could just make out the tip of his birthmark, a dark stain on his skin not unlike the freckle. But when Kaoru turned even further to look him in the eye, Shinya realized that was it: he didn’t want to think Kaoru loved him back. Love ruined people; love ruined his mom and soured the relationship she and Shinya had. Love was going to destroy what he and Kaoru had, too.

“No,” he said. He took a step back, shoving Kaoru’s hand away.

Without it, the night seemed so much colder.

“No?”

“No,” Shinya said. He took another step back as Kaoru reached for him, a pleading look flitting across his face.

“We can’t talk about it?”

Shinya started to say no, they couldn’t, but the look on Kaoru’s face made him cave. “I don’t want what we have to change,” he said. “Everybody says you shouldn’t date your friends, and you’re my best friend. I don’t want that to change. I don’t want things to be awkward between us. I don’t want us to drift apart.”

“Shinya,” Kaoru said, at a loss.

“I didn’t want to,” Shinya went on, horrified at the tremble in his voice and yet powerless to stop it. “If—if I could go back and figure out where all this started, I’d change it. I’d love somebody else. Maybe Okuma, I don’t know. Because—because you mean too much to me for me to want to risk it thinking you love me back. What if I do something, and it makes you decide you don’t want to be friends anymore?”

“What could you do that I’d think like that?” Kaoru asked, coming closer. Shinya was becoming very aware of how alone they were on the sidewalk. It was making Kaoru stupidly brave; Shinya stopped his advance with his hands on Kaoru’s chest—cold with ice but warm with his heat—and couldn’t look at him anymore. He focused on a slick patch of black ice by a streetlamp.

“Shinya,” Kaoru said, and Shinya could, somehow, feel the pounding of his heart under his layers. “Can’t you look at me?”

“No,” Shinya said.

“Why not?”

“You know why!”

“Maybe I do, but I want you to tell me,” Kaoru said.

“You’re being an ass, you know,” Shinya spat. “You know I love you, and then you go and do shit like this when I told you to stop. I’m saying I don’t want what we have to change. Isn’t that enough for you?”

It wasn’t; Shinya could see it in his face. But he sighed, relenting. He took Shinya’s hands in his—so warm, Shinya didn’t realize how cold he’d gotten without them—and muttered, “Maybe that’s why I liked Emi. If I had a question, she’d answer it, no matter how strange it was. She always had or found a reason for everything. If I asked her about this, what would she say?”

Shinya wasn’t sure if he was being asked that and kept quiet.

Kaoru sighed again, letting go of his hands to tug him in close. Shinya’s head rested right on his chest where his heart pounded away. Kaoru kept going. “I wonder if she’d tell me I love you back.”

Shinya hit him; Kaoru doubled down. “No, I do wonder if she’d say that,” he said. “If you went back in time and loved somebody else, I think I wouldn’t be able to stand it. If you held someone else’s hand—if you let someone else hug you—”

“Shut up,” Shinya said, voice sharp. “I don’t—I don’t _care_. It doesn’t matter who holds my damn hand or who hugs me. I don’t want us to change.”

“But we’re going to,” Kaoru said, as simply stated as if he was commenting on the weather. “We’re going to change. We already have. That’s normal, Shinya.”

“I don’t care!” Shinya beat at his chest. The cold was making his nose run, and it dripped into his scarf to trail icy fingers down his neck. “I don’t want to change! I don’t want to love you! I never asked for this to happen!”

“No one does, but it happens,” Kaoru said, still frustratingly calm. “You can’t live trapped in the past. You can’t live without changing. But that doesn’t mean that the past hasn’t happened. No matter what, we’ll always have been friends.”

“Dumbass,” Shinya said, though it lacked the venom he wanted to put in. “I want to stay friends. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Kaoru said, with a sigh that said he was giving in. Shinya hated it, but he hated standing here trying to convince Kaoru that nothing would ever be the same again between them. Now everything would be loaded with too much meaning and too many promises. They would never be two friends indulging in comfort, as simple as that, for the rest of their lives. “Nothing at all.”

Kaoru held him closer, tighter, until it felt like the only reason he was standing, as if he’d fall to pieces the second Kaoru let go. Shinya had once been able to stand on his own two feet, fighting on his own, perfectly content to keep everyone at arm’s length where they couldn’t hurt him.

This was his fault. He’d let Kaoru in where he hadn’t let anyone in before, and look where it got him. Everything was falling apart.

* * *

It was a tense few weeks of visiting protective services, and of Shinya sneaking past his mother, parked in a cafe or convenience store near his school. Someone had to have given her notice that Shinya was back, or maybe she’d realized what the lack of packets meant, but Shinya in his new coat and hat didn’t catch her attention.

It was a small blessing. It meant he had to deal with the good-cop-bad-cop routine of the protective services investigators, the uptight woman’s smile gradually becoming pinched as her partner’s sagged with worry lines. Shinya’s mom wasn’t cooperating with them at all, and she’d taken the veiled threat of his being sent away about as well as he expected her to.

The invite to a diner down in Ogikubo surprised him; he was assured it would be supervised, but he could bring a friend along if it made him feel better. Kaoru was busy with a lab that day—it made Shinya only the tiniest bit relieved to hear—but Okuma demanded to go.

“You’re not getting rid of me that easy,” he declared, and glued himself to Shinya’s side. Sakurazawa glowered at them both.

“What’d you do now?” Shinya asked, wondering if he really wanted to know.

“Nothing,” Okuma said. “It’s just Shu being dumb. Don’t think about it too much.”

Shinya snorted. Okuma chattered on almost all the way to the diner; Shinya barely had to acknowledge that he was listening, and found himself wondering if the reason Sakurazawa looked so jealous anytime they hung out was because he liked Okuma the same way Shinya liked Kaoru.

Then he caught himself and scowled at the sidewalk. As if. Real life wasn’t some terrible TV soap opera. Okuma and Sakurazawa were friends, that was all.

Even the way he thought was changing.

The diner was warm when they arrived; Okuma shed his scarf and gloves as soon as they were through the door as Shinya scanned the tables for the investigator duo. They were in a corner, sitting across from a college student who looked like he hadn’t bathed in days—or eaten, if the amount of plates already stacked on his side said anything. He scratched at the stubble on his chin as they walked over.

Shinya stopped short, taking in the table: coats and bags slung onto a chair, the uptight woman’s draped over the back of hers; the drinks the duo had half-finished; the college kid eyeing him through a hank of greasy bangs. There was a hair tie wrapped around his wrist like a bracelet.

“Oda,” said the older investigator, “you made it. This is—”

“Hiroaki Ueki,” said the student. “Guess we’re cousins.”

His face said that he didn’t believe it—but that might have been the bruises under his eyes, such a deep purple they were nearly black. His hand shook as he spooned up another helping of omelet rice; his other one snatched his mug of coffee from the uptight woman’s grip as she dragged it away.

“I’ve been stuck in a lab for three days watching cultures,” he growled. “All I want is some damn coffee before I go home and collapse.”

“That is your fourth cup,” said the uptight woman.

“And I’ll have more if I want, damn it.”

That set Okuma to snickering. They settled into the last two chairs, Okuma scanning the menu over for the priciest item once he was told he wouldn’t have to foot the bill. Shinya ordered hamburger steak without looking.

Then he waited for the duo to explain.

“When we heard Ueki was attending university here in Tokyo, we thought you’d like to get in touch,” explained the older man, “and have a chance to get to know the rest of your family. Things being as they are, well…”

“I’m gonna have to move, aren’t I,” Shinya said.

Okuma coughed.

“Your mother being so uncooperative isn’t presenting a decent angle for her case, no,” said the uptight woman. “We were lucky the landlord agreed to work with us. That apartment was… deplorable.”

“Now, now,” said her partner, in a tone of voice that said she’d said too much, “we aren’t here to discuss the case so much as to get Oda acquainted with part of his family. Ueki spent many a summer at his uncle’s, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Ueki said, bobbing his head. “Nice place. Kinda old, but uncle ‘n them take care of it. He’s a mechanic, though, and the yard’s always fulla rust buckets with the parts pulled out. How old’re you again?”

“Fifteen,” Shinya offered.

“Huh,” said Ueki, who went back to his meal.

“We know you weren’t able to take your entrance exams, Oda,” said the older man, “but there’s a school in the area that said they’ll take you if you pass theirs. According to Ueki, it isn’t a top school, so you shouldn’t have any problem.”

“And your uncle has a spare room in the house,” said the uptight woman. “It’s about as big as the one you have now, though they’ve been using it for storage. If there’s anything you’d like sent over, he’ll have it set up for you when you arrive.”

Shinya thought of the computer he’d stopped using, and the books from Kaoru that had gone missing. Nothing in that room was irreplaceable. His mom had taken everything that meant anything. “I don’t really have anything I want to take. Nothing big, anyway.”

“Hold on,” Okuma said, having recovered from his coughing fit. “You’re—you’re really gonna move? You’re gonna have to move to the—the _country_? You never mentioned that!”

“It ain’t that bad,” Ueki said, dragging his cup back over.

“But it’s the country!”

“It’s the only place where I can get away from my mom,” Shinya said, focusing on the floral print of the woman’s blouse. She really liked pink. “And she can… get help. Maybe. If I’m not here for her to focus on, maybe she’ll try to get better.”

“We’re hoping so, too,” said the older man. “It may only be for a year or so. We don’t like to separate families like this, but Oda came to us for help, and we’ll do all we can to put him and his mother together again in the future. For now, they may only need space.”

Ueki snorted. “From what Uncle Jiro said, they’re gonna need more than space.”

“Oh?” asked the woman. “And what did he say, exactly?”

Ueki took a long drink from his cup. Even the server looked concerned when he asked for another refill as she came over with their orders, but he scowled and snorted and then asked for water with a roll of his eyes.

When he got his water, he sipped at it, grimacing. “He said Aunt Hanae likes to keep what’s important to her close. Said he forgot she had this—this keepsake box, when she was a kid. She put everything that caught her eye in it, even if it wasn’t hers, and she’d take it everywhere. She had a meltdown when she ran out of room and dumped it all in the river. ‘Space’ ain’t a word she’s gonna understand.”

“Well, with time and help—” the woman began to say, but stopped as Ueki shook his head.

“She don’t want help, or she woulda called up her damn family and asked for it,” Ueki said. “Uncle Jiro woulda helped out in a heartbeat, and Aunt Hanae knows that, but she don’t care. She’d rather suffer and keep on acting like a brat than admit that she’s been in way over her head and making her kid miserable. Tell me I’m wrong,” he said to Shinya.

“Not really,” Shinya said, cutting up his steak. He wondered if there was any point to saying the rest, but supposed it didn’t matter: either his mom got help or didn’t. Either way, he was done with her. “I don’t think it’s that she doesn’t care. I think she’s been trying to prove that she can do it on her own, like somebody important told her she couldn’t manage it. Although that could just be something in her head, too. Maybe whatever happened to my dad hurt her that bad. I dunno.”

“Whatever it is, she ain’t gonna be going around, asking for help,” Ueki said. “Uncle Jiro would know better than I do, though. Good thing is, once you’re out at his place, little Shinya, there’re lots of places to hide.”

“Don’t call me little,” Shinya snapped.

Ueki laughed him off and polished off his omelet rice. Okuma picked at his meal, some kind of giant burger that was bigger than his head, cutting it up into pieces and then sifting those around his plate.

Ueki paid for his meals while they ate, then sat there, checking his phone and staring around the diner. The investigators had dug out their own phones and typed up emails, right there at the table. Shinya stabbed a carrot.

“So, what’s going to happen?” Shinya asked. “Am I going or not?”

The older man blinked at him. “Well, as long as you’re comfortable with it—”

“I’d be comfortable anywhere as long as it’s not back with her,” Shinya reminded him. “I’d sleep on the streets if I had to, but Kaoru won’t like it if I did. He’d rather I’d be someplace that’s going to take care of me, and my uncle’s the only one who has the room. So. When do I go?”

“Aunt Fumie’s saying you should visit on a long weekend,” Ueki said, checking his phone again. “She also says hello, and that they’ll take you out to pick out furniture.”

“I don’t need furniture,” Shinya said, thinking of the pile of clothes on Leblanc’s attic’s floor and the couch he’d been crashing on for well over a month, now. He stamped down the thought that a decent bed would be nice.

“These things take time,” said the older man, with a sigh. “If she were threatening your life, we’d have cause to move the process along faster, but for right now even we’re tied up, waiting for your uncle’s temporary guardianship to be approved. There’s always a backlog.”

Shinya scowled and ate some more, just to avoid making a bigger scene. He didn’t need to act like a brat just because everything wasn’t resolved right then and there at the table; he didn’t need to act like his mom, stomping his feet just because of a minor inconvenience.

“You don’t wanna get bombarded with the whole family all at once, anyway,” Ueki said. “Go up an’ see ‘em on a long weekend or something. Get to know Uncle Jiro and Aunt Fumie and Hisako. See if you can fit in for an hour or two, then come back. If ya do it that way, ain’t nobody gonna have the time to march their ass there and get on your nerves.”

“I’ll go, too,” Okuma said, cutting another hamburger patty into bite-sized pieces. “I wanna see it.”

He wanted to judge it, more like, but Shinya didn’t care. Uncle Jiro could run a dump; his house could be made out of scrap iron and rotted boards. The school could be a den of delinquents in the making.

Shinya didn’t care.

This was for Kaoru’s sake—and Mr. Iwai’s, and Mr. Mori’s, and even Uncle Jiro’s. They cared whether he was out on the streets or safe in a home, and they cared enough to call the right people and put together the right paperwork to make sure he got it.

“Fine,” he muttered.

“Good,” Okuma said, likely already thinking of how bad a house in the countryside could be. Shinya could see him sauntering down the dirt roads like he owned the place, just because he was from the city. With Shinya’s luck, he’d probably find some farm boy to slobber all over.

God.

Ueki laughed again, a distinct, wheezing chortle that sounded like he was choking on air. Maybe he was. He looked half-ready to fall asleep at the table, as if eating had been the only thing keeping him awake. “You’ll be bored shitless there, but try to withstand it, little Shinya,” he said, with a pat on Shinya’s shoulder for good measure. He heaved himself to his feet.

“Don’t call me little,” Shinya told him as he gathered up his coat and bulging bag. A shirtsleeve poked out of the top, the cuff stained with coffee. Shinya wrinkled his nose.

“Then grow up fast, kid,” Ueki said, ruffling Shinya’s hair on his way out the diner. Shinya watched him nearly stumble into the door, looking for all the world like a drunk man too deep in his cups to stay upright instead of a college kid high on sleep deprivation and too much caffeine.

The uptight woman, with her tight frown, stared at Ueki’s vacant seat and muttered, “Well.”

“He’s a very busy graduate student,” the older man offered in explanation. “Today was the only day he’d have any free time until the term is over. I know he looked a bit unkempt, but—”

“A bit,” Okuma repeated, dripping sarcasm. He was finally eating his burger. “I think I’ve seen hobos more put together than that. My loony great-grandpa had a better head on his shoulders.”

Shinya shrugged, thinking of Kaoru and his late nights at the campus, or his late nights spent studying in his room. Kaoru was still only a freshman; would he, too, turn into a stumbling punch-drunk fool in his senior year? Or would that only be after?

“That aside,” said the woman, “what do you think, Oda? There’s still time to pull the paperwork out of the system.”

“I’m going,” Shinya said. Okuma took a vicious stab at his burger. “I am,” Shinya said, more forcefully. “And if you’re going to be a brat about it, you can just stay here.”

“You never said you were moving,” Okuma said, more hurt than angry.

“You didn’t think I was?”

Okuma scowled at his plate. “No. Maybe. I don’t know,” he said, sagging into his chair, looking as if he wished he could disappear. “We just became friends, and now you’re moving. It’s like—it’s whiplash, okay? I thought we were more than just close classmates.”

“Right,” Shinya said, “because everyone in class knows about it, right?”

“No,” Okuma said.

“Then we’re not just close classmates.” Shinya shut his mouth before he could add something dumb like, _Quit sulking_ , or _Stop being a baby._

Because it was fucking obvious: Okuma had finally found a friend he could trust with all of himself, even the part he hid from his childhood friends, and the fact that Shinya was leaving without a single glance back had to hurt. Once he was in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, Okuma was going to be alone again in the one way that mattered.

Well, maybe not—Sakurazawa knew, but he seemed more annoyed with his best friend than ever before. It wasn’t exactly good confiding behavior.

As if Shinya could talk. Kaoru had wanted to talk it out just the other day, and Shinya had pushed him away, thinking it was easier than accepting that Kaoru might love him back.

Maybe he might, but it wouldn’t be in the same way. Shinya wasn’t about to go diving into fantasies that he knew would never come to pass; Kaoru had a girlfriend, even if they’d broken up. Shinya was not the type of person Kaoru wanted to kiss.

It felt very unfair.

He stabbed at another carrot.

“Well,” huffed the uptight woman, her lips pursed.

Like pink, she seemed to enjoy that word.

Her partner motioned for the check and said, “We’ll be in touch as soon as we can proceed. Even if your mother does manage to get a hold of you again, we’ll have enough probable cause by then to get you out of there and with your uncle. Ueki assured us that you’ll be in good hands, there. Jiro Oda often took care of his nieces and nephews when their parents were out of town—just think of it as an extended stay.”

“Yeah,” Shinya said.

As the two got up and shrugged on their coats, he added, “Um. Thanks. For doing all of this.”

“You don’t need to thank us,” the uptight woman said as she checked her purse. “It’s our job.” She paused to double check her phone, then tucked it away and looked Shinya in the eye. “But… you’re welcome. And may I say that you have a set of very devoted friends, Oda.”

Okuma looked up in surprise, but the woman hurried away, joining her partner by the register. He prodded some more at his burger, then said, “So. Like, I’m not sorry I’m mad at you, but…”

“You don’t want to fight,” Shinya guessed.

“Yeah,” he said, propping his head up with his fist and daring a bite. By the look on his face, his food had gone cold. “I kind of hoped you wouldn’t have to, y’know, move. But I also thought, well, where else would you go? Who would take in some kid they didn’t know if they didn’t have something in it for them?”

Shinya scoffed, trying to brush his words off, but it was true: who would take in a brat like him, with no talent to speak of? A genius kid would have people fighting for the honor of being his guardian, but not Shinya. The only thing he’d been good at was Gun About, and he’d traded in that skill to be halfway decent at everything else.

(He tried not to think that it was because Prim had come along and ruined games for him forever. Just the thought that he could wind up controlling a real, live person in a far-off, distant world made him shiver with dread; he wouldn’t do that to anyone else. Never again.)

He said, “I don’t want to move either. It’s just… I have to. She won’t even listen to the government guys, that’s how bad she’s gotten. Even if she had her way, I don’t know where I’d be.”

He used to have free reign after school, in the hours between the last bell and when she arrived home from work. He had a key, and pocket money, and could do whatever. He wondered if someone had said something to her, or if this, too, was a long time coming. He couldn’t do anything she didn’t like if he was locked up in his room all day—except he had. He’d refused to talk to her. He’d picked at his meals. He’d done everything in his limited power to make her miserable, when all she wanted was to hear that she was doing a good job.

She wasn’t, and he’d made sure to let her know that with every snub. Shinya had known he was winning when she began calling him every name in the book. It didn’t matter that it was a hollow victory, that despite everything he still hadn’t annoyed her enough to make her see sense.

Because she was already broken, a little voice whispered. There was nothing in her to fix, no way to fit the pieces back together. All the king’s forces couldn’t put her back together again—or something like that.

Shinya was no king, and he had no forces—just his friends, and his newfound family, and the investigator duo making sure he had a chance at a decent life.

Then why—why did it feel like nothing? Why was he so reluctant to accept that this was the most any of them could do?

Because of Prim, probably. She’d given him so much—and she’d taken away so much, too.

“Hey,” Okuma said, after a few minutes where they sat and ate in silence.

“What?”

“If—” He paused, took a deep breath, and tried again. “I’m going to tell my friends about me. I want you to be there. I can’t tell what’s going on with Shu anymore; I don’t know if he’s doing this to get the rest of them to ditch me, and then he’ll leave too, or what.”

Shinya thought for a moment, going back to that stupid, niggling thought from before. He couldn’t help but say it. “Maybe he likes you. Loves you. Whatever.”

Okuma scrunched up his nose, like he hated the idea of it, but over several more minutes he relaxed. Something like understanding flitted across his face. Softly, he asked, “Do you—do you think so?”

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have said it,” Shinya said. “I get him wanting you to come out to them, but if he didn’t have some kind of motive he’d be helping you. Sneaking in hints in their conversations, or offering to be there instead, and—why me, and not him, anyway?”

“Because I can’t tell if he actually gets it or not. He’s making it sound like—like I’ve got a secret pet or something. People don’t get killed over keeping a dog they aren’t supposed to have, but he’s—” He broke off with a ragged sigh, raking a hand through his hair. “The point is, you don’t care. You didn’t care before you knew me, and you didn’t care after. The rest of them, they’ve got this—this vision of me in their heads already, and it’s definitely not gay.”

Shinya wondered what his classmates thought of him. Before, he would have been the troublemaker—the gambling, and his hair, and his steadfast refusal to join any kind of club all pointed to it. But if word had gotten around about his mom—what did they think now? Did they think he was some kid to be pitied? That he was doing all of it for attention?

However they saw him, it probably didn’t include having a massive crush on his best friend.

“Sure,” he said.

“Look, I know you don’t—huh?”

“I said I’ll do it. I’ll go.” Shinya scraped sauce around his plate. Okuma wasn’t done his burger, but he’d probably never intended to finish it in the first place. “It’s not like I’ll be here much longer anyway, and it’s the least I can do as a thank you before I go.”

“You wanna thank me? What for?” Okuma had the audacity to ask.

“What do you think?”

“Dunno,” Okuma said, feigning innocence. “For granting you the immense honor of being my friend? For bringing you weeks of homework? For the pleasure of my company?”

“Those are the same thing,” Shinya said, and hit him for good measure.


	7. The Confrontation, Part One

Okuma at least had the decency to postpone his inevitable coming out until after the next long weekend. He and Shinya spent most of that time on the train, then on a bus, and then snoozing in the back of Uncle Jiro’s pickup truck. Okuma had an opinion on everything—on the selection of stores in the area (none), on the amount of things to do that didn’t involve physical activities like hiking through the mountains (unless Shinya wanted to become a hermit, also none), and even on the furniture Shinya wanted to pick out (too cheap, he said, even though Shinya was probably only going to be there a year, tops).

But for all his complaining, he never once said that Shinya should stay in Tokyo, or that the city had so much more to occupy his time. They poked around the ancient cars and mopeds snagged in dead weeds in the yard, tripping over rusted-out engines and fuel tanks left scattered around like discarded toys.

Uncle Jiro was a short man with his hair kept back by an ever-present cap that hid a severe widow’s peak; he smiled too much, told too many jokes, and hovered at the edges of Shinya’s vision, like a well-meaning ghost. Aunt Fumie was strict where her husband was lenient, and Hirako made an appearance all but once in a pair of pajamas, scurrying off to her room when her mother reminded her they had company.

Whatever the hell that was about.

The nights were far colder than the days, and snow piled up along the sides of the roads, pushed out of the way or trampled by tires, but Shinya could see the stars up in the sky his second night there, crystal-clear and bright.

Prim was living happily on one of those stars. Maybe she’d be happy to find out that he was finally almost happy, too. It would just be a little longer.

As soon as the school day was over after they returned, Okuma was in his face, wearing a look of nervous determination. He didn’t have to ask; Shinya packed up his schoolbag and followed him to a park a few stations away. It was deserted despite the hour; Shinya would have expected to see kids scrambling over the equipment. Instead there was a group of students clustered around the swings—bespectacled Higuchi leaning against the bar, a girl with her hair braided over her shoulder reading and pushing herself back and forth, a mousy-haired timid boy slumped in the other swing. Sakurazawa was the only one who waved as they walked over.

Though if Shinya was being honest, Sakurazawa didn’t look happy to see him.

“Okuma,” Higuchi said, foregoing a greeting. “What’s this about?”

It wasn’t Shinya’s imagination: they were staring at him, the mousy-haired boy looking between him and Okuma and huddling further into his scarf.

“You keep asking why I’ve been hanging out with Oda lately. Now you get to know,” Okuma told him. The girl with the braid shut her book to listen. Okuma took a few steadying breaths. Sakurazawa looked more pissed than ever the longer he waited.

“I’m gay, okay?” Okuma blurted out. “Oda was just—there, and I mentioned it offhand. I figured nobody’d believe him if he went around spreading it, but then it felt pretty nice to have one person who knew about it, and he never said anything, so…”

He ran out of steam. The girl with the braid and Sakurazawa looked on, faces blank. Higuchi looked as if he was getting ready to laugh; only the timid boy looked surprised. “Really?” he said, looking from Okuma to Shinya and back again, eyes wide.

“Don’t be absurd, Ogata,” Higuchi said. “Clearly this is a prank. Oda must have put him up to it. Everyone knows he’s nothing but a delinquent.”

“As far as I’m aware, Oda hasn’t participated in any such activities since first year,” said the girl with the braid. “It would be strange for him to start back up now, and I don’t think Ryo is the type to fall for blackmail. What in the world could he not want us to know so badly that he’d be willing to do what Oda said?”

“I think this is pretty big,” Ogata said, still sounding shocked. “But if Oda were blackmailing him, why would he come out and say it?”

“Whatever this is about, it isn’t funny,” Higuchi said, disregarding what the other two were saying. Ignoring it was easier than having to take it seriously, Shiny asupposed. “I can’t believe you’d be the type of person who’d allow yourself to be talked into this—no, actually, you are, aren’t you? You’ve always been that way. The question is: why listen to Oda at all?”

“But he just said why,” Ogata said, more to himself than to the group. He slumped in his swing.

“Aren’t you the only one looking for an explanation?” asked the braided girl. “If we take Ryo at his word, it makes the most sense. There’s no need to—”

“Of course there’s a need to!” Higuchi shouted, his voice echoing across the empty park. Ogata shoved his hands over his ears and curled up even further; Sakurazawa patted him on the shoulder. “It’s Okuma,” he went on, as if that was enough explanation. “He’s always following whatever whim enters his head. Look at his hair, for God’s sake. No self-respecting man would bother, but he’s in class every other week with a new style. He’s malleable. That’s why this has to be a prank—because Okuma heard that it’s funny.”

“I’ve never heard of a prank like that,” Sakurazawa finally said.

“You’re being far too defensive,” said the girl.

Ogata made a noise in the back of his throat, like he was about to cry; Higuchi turned on him. “Don’t start,” he growled. “Honestly, what is wrong with you—”

“Let him,” Shinya said. Higuchi stopped his tirade short and turned, as if noticing he was there for the first time. Shinya met his glare.

Just as Higuchi was psyching himself up for another round, Shinya said, “I think you’ve got some ass-backwards views of what a man’s supposed to look like. If Ogata wants to cry, let him. If Okuma’s gay, so fucking what? You’re the only here with a problem, and you know it.”

The braided girl nodded. Ogata’s shoulders shook under Sakurazawa’s hands. Higuchi turned to him and said, “Sakurazawa, you can’t believe this drivel, can you?”

“Yeah, actually, I can,” Sakurazawa said with a shrug. “Ryo told me weeks ago—and yeah, I was pretty pissed about it, but I thought it over. He can’t change who he is, and that’s not his fault. I’ve been pestering him to say something ever since. It isn’t right or fair to keep secrets from your friends, and at least now he knows who’s behind him.”

“Oh,” said the girl, “is that why you’ve been so angry lately?”

“Kind of,” Sakurazawa said, looking away.

The girl hummed. Higuchi opened his mouth; she raised a hand, cutting him off. “Don’t start,” she said. “Oda’s right: the only one here with a problem is you, Higuchi. You’ve been keeping us all at a distance for over a year, now, as if you’re trying to prove a point. I don’t know what that point is, and I don’t much care to. One would think you’re the malleable one, shaping your thoughts and ideologies to whomever you’re trying to suck up to.”

“I am not—”

“You are,” she stated firmly. “Unless you’re gay as well, and you’ve been trying to hide it? That certainly seems like a probable reason, doesn’t it? You’ve spent so long thinking that there must be something wrong with you, and then Ryo comes out to us and here you are, trying to make us all hate him the same way you hate yourself—”

“I am not,” Higuchi cut in, as sharp as blade. The look on his face could wilt flowers and make children cry—it was the disgust Shinya had been prepared to see on Kaoru’s face, and on Mr. Iwai’s, and on Mr. Mori’s, and he took hold of Okuma’s sleeve. It was the closest he could get to giving comfort in the middle of a park with his friends nearby.

“I am not,” Higuchi said again, lip curling. “Just the thought of it makes my skin crawl. Men have no business being together that way. It’s disgusting”—Okuma flinched—“and repulsive”—Ogata sobbed—“not to mention the culture that’s built up around it, like it’s something to be _proud_ of. They parade in the streets half-naked, without a shred of decency, you know. They’re slowly taking over the media; don’t think I don’t know what kind of books you’ve been reading, Honma. Women shouldn’t be putting that filth into their heads—”

“Higuchi,” Sakurazawa warned. Honma looked down at her book, brushing the cover.

“What?” Higuchi laughed. “It’s the truth! That filth rots the mind. It sends women into lustful fantasies over the men they should be trying to woo. It makes the men sleep with each other. They waste their youth—”

He cut off as Honma’s fist connected with his jaw, sending him sprawling. He spat blood onto the dirt, then a tooth, and stared at her as if she were alien.

She may as well have been: gone was the bookish girl Shinya had thought she was, replaced with a woman ringed, he thought, by lightning. The whole park went dark as a cloud obscured the sun.

“The only disgusting one here is you,” she spat. “I’ll be sure to let all the girls know. We’ll see if you can find a proper, _decent_ woman to marry then, Higuchi.”

Higuchi flinched as she whirled to Sakurazawa. “I’ll take Ippei home, Shu. If I stay any longer he’ll wind up in the hospital.”

“I—yeah,” Sakurazawa said, handing over the crying Ogata.

Before they went too far, she called out, “I’ll see you at school tomorrow, Ryo.”

Okuma nodded, wordless. He stared at Higuchi, still sprawled out on the dirt, staring at his tooth and mopping up the blood dripping from his mouth with a sleeve—or maybe staring at her book, one of the English classics they were supposed to be reading for school.

Sakurazawa picked it up, his face clouded. “Get out of here, Higuchi.”

Higuchi ran, stumbling back into the dirt once or twice on his way out the gate. Sakurazawa sighed, raked a hand through his hair, kicked dirt over the little pool of blood. “Now what?” he asked. “You want me to leave too, Ryo?”

“No,” Okuma said. His voice was weak, and it trembled, but he still found the courage to say, “There’s something else I want to ask you. Just you.”

Sakurazawa glanced at Shinya. Shinya wasn’t stupid enough to stick around, and made to move to the slide, where he could sit and wait out their conversation—but Okuma snagged his sleeve before he could. “Oda can stay. I don’t think it’ll take long.”

Sakurazawa narrowed his eyes but said, “Sure. Alright.”

“Good. Cool,” Okuma said, trying for calm and failing. His grip was too tight, and he sniffed at the end. “Listen, Shu. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but—do you like me?”

“I wouldn’t be friends with you if I didn’t,” Sakurazawa said.

“No,” Okuma said, shaking his head, carefully feathered bangs flying. “That’s not—I mean, do you love me? Is that why you’ve been so weird lately? You can’t stand me hanging out with Oda all the time because he’s, I dunno, monopolizing my time?”

“I don’t love you,” Sakurazawa said, simply. “I like you. We’re friends.” He shifted on his feet, glancing at every corner of the park except at them. A housewife and a dog passed by the gate, the dog stopping to sniff at patch of sidewalk. “And maybe I’ve been acting jealous lately, but—we’re friends. We’re best friends. And you—you told Oda something about yourself that even I didn’t know, so maybe I got pissed off. But it made me think, too: eventually we aren’t going to be in the same school, or the same class. Eventually we’re going to be working in different companies. We aren’t always going to be together, the way we have been. We aren’t always going to share what’s going on in our lives. Maybe we’ll drift apart a little, and someone else is going to take my place. Like—like a lover.”

His place, Shinya thought. As if Okuma would never be replaced in the same way.

“And when I thought some more, yeah, you’re right: I wanted to monopolize your time,” Sakurazawa admitted. “I wanted to be the only person you looked at and talked to. But that’s not love, that’s obsession.” He shrugged and shook his head. The housewife and her dog moved on. “I think it’d be easier if I did love you. At least then I’d have a reason, right? But instead, it’s this—this ugly feeling, like if you’re out there without me, I’m nothing. Like I can only be somebody when I’m around you. I don’t like it.”

“Shit, Shu,” Okuma said. “How much thinking have you been doing?”

“Tons,” Sakurazawa said, with a wry grin. “Just tons of it. I swear I almost failed my entrance exams thinking about it all. I guess that’s when I realized it wasn’t right, to be so hung up on somebody that I forgot about everything else. Like I said, obsession.”

They were both quiet for a long moment. Shinya was too afraid to speak up and ruin the moment—what would he say, anyway? That he was glad it all worked out?

Sakurazawa finally said: “So, uh. I’m sorry for making you worry. And I’ll get better at not being an ass.” He pulled a face. “Although I think Higuchi’s got me beat there. Talk about being a dick; it’s like he forgot that Yuriko doesn’t want to be a housewife. ‘Waste of their youth’, please.”

Okuma snorted, then started laughing. “Did you—did you see the look on his face when she punched him? Holy shit, dude—yeah, girls can punch! Shit!”

He couldn’t seem to stop, and he clung even tighter to Shinya’s sleeve to keep himself upright. Sakurazawa, after a moment, followed suit, his hands reaching out to hold Okuma.

Shinya supposed it would be funny, if his mom hadn’t already demonstrated how violent girls could be. Shinya supposed it would be funny, if Higuchi hadn’t lost a tooth; Shinya had survived a lot over the years, but it had never gotten to that point.

Unless his ears counted. They probably did.

Shinya kept his mouth shut and waited; every time the laughter seemed to be dying down, one of them would start it up anew, until they were clutching at each other, tears streaming down their red faces, so breathless they could barely speak. They laughed until they couldn’t anymore, until their throats were raw and they were slumped on the ground and people who passed by the gate stared at the odd trio by the swings.

Before they went home for the night, Okuma gave him a hug so tight it nearly squeezed the breath out of him. When he let go, Sakurazawa did the same, muttering, “Guess you’re alright, Oda,” in his ear.

Shinya wondered what that meant, but tried not to dwell on it.

* * *

The days passed by in a blur. Kaoru went from home to school and back again, sometimes just to sleep. Dad woke him up on the couch more often than not, and Kaoru found that the chore list they’d drawn up and kept tacked to the fridge since middle school was becoming more and more skewed.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dad said, after cooking breakfast for the fourth day in a row. Kaoru had overslept, which was becoming too easy to do, with his late nights spent worrying over lab reports and Shinya. He couldn’t remember the last time he stood at the stove to make anything other than instant ramen. He couldn’t remember the last time he had the energy to.

“But it’s not fair to you,” Kaoru mumbled, voice too thick with sleep to work properly. He poured himself juice and water and sipped at both.

“Yeah, well,” Dad said, “I ain’t the one working my ass off goin’ to school. Eat, kid.”

Kaoru ate, and helped wash the dishes, and then was out the door again. He was on the train, halfway to campus, when he realized it was a holiday—the other students he recognized were nowhere to be seen, and there were more families out than normal.

Dad would laugh at him if he turned around and went home now, so he milled about at school, wondering whether Shinya was free or if he should catch up on some reading, when Emi sent him a text: **Are you free K?**

He never liked texting. He called her. “Yeah, I’m free. What’s up?”

She groaned. In the background he could hear screaming children. “Save me from a day spent with my cousins, Kaoru, I’m begging you,” she said.

He stared at the campus, the gates open and inviting and felt the bag on his shoulder digging in, filled with books and a laptop he didn’t necessarily need. A day to himself would be nice, but so would taking the chance to hang out with someone. “Sure,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

“Anything!” she said, quickly, then shouted that she was going out as she gathered up her things and put her shoes on. Her cousins didn’t seem to care. “Oh, I know! I still haven’t met your friend yet! Let’s do that!”

“I don’t know if now’s a good time,” Kaoru said, but the door was shutting behind her.

“Well, find out!” she said, sounding much more elated now that she was out of the house.

So he did: he woke Shinya up—“Damn it, Kaoru, it’s a holiday!”—and invited him to finally meet Emi, and though Shinya grumbled the whole time he got dressed, he still agreed.

They met up on Central Street, Shinya’s breath smelling of curry spices, Emi with a dusting of flour still on her cheek. Kaoru stood between them like a bridge as they looked each other over: Shinya, just starting a growth spurt, barely came up to her chin, and his clothes were wrinkled from too much time spent on the attic floor; Emi, bags under her eyes from one too many sleepless nights spent studying, her hair pulled over her shoulder and caught under her scarf.

“Oh,” she said. “So you’re Shinya Oda.”

“Yeah,” Shinya said, already glaring at her, though Kaoru was sure it was because he’d been woken from a sound sleep and not because he was angry at her in particular. “And you’re—”

His throat caught on the words. Kaoru’s girlfriend. Kaoru’s ex-girlfriend. “Emi Ogawa,” Emi said, and Shinya snorted.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “So, what’re we doing?”

They wound up ducking back to the station to peruse the underground mall and take the chance to enjoy the heat before the lunch crowds pushed them out. They flipped a coin over whether to get lunch at the diner (crowded) or Big Bang Burger (also crowded), and Emi pouted that it was too cold to stand in line for crepes.

Kaoru would have done it, but Shinya was eyeing the crowds too nervously to stand being in a line that long. Big Bang Burger won, and Kaoru took the seat by the window, sure that he knew what all of Shinya’s dodgy looks were for. His mother was still out there, causing trouble in her search for him, and all their caution wouldn’t mean a thing if she found Shinya.

They ate, soaking in the heat and the crowds jostling outside. Students came and went from the arcade across the street in bunches, laughing and chatting, some looking despondent at the hit to their wallets. Emi snagged fries from their trays, noticed Kaoru staring out the window, and said, “Oh, an arcade! I’ve never been before. How about there, next?”

“No,” Shinya said, without hesitation. He dragged his tray closer, until it was all but spilling onto his lap.

“Aw, why not?” she asked. Her eyes widened. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been before, either? Then we should totally go!”

“It’s too small for these crowds,” Shinya said, then blinked and scowled at his tray.

Emi latched onto his slip of the tongue and reached blindly for Kaoru’s tray. Kaoru let her grab up a handful of fries as she said, “So you have been before! That’s perfect! Which games are the best, do you think?”

Shinya scowled, refusing to answer.

“Emi, why don’t we go somewhere else?” Kaoru asked. “There are games at Dome Town, or at the boardwalk. They’d love cold weather visitors.”

“But it’s cold,” Emi whined, and Kaoru wondered where all of this was coming from. She’d wanted to meet Shinya for the longest time; she’d wanted to get along with him. But he was clearly uncomfortable in the crowds and arcade. Kaoru had never pegged her as the type to push like this.

But maybe that was his fault, for agreeing to what she wanted all the time so readily. He never denied Shinya anything, either—save for breaking him out of his apartment. That had been against his wishes, but none of them would be sitting here if he hadn’t.

“Can’t we just go in for a while?” she asked, clearly begging. “Just for a bit? The lunch rush will drag them all out anyway; we can totally go in, take a peek, and be back out before it gets bad again!”

“No,” Shinya said. “Arcades aren’t that great, anyway. I’d rather go somewhere else.”

“What, you don’t like them?”

“What’s to like? If you win, everybody thinks you cheated. If you lose, everybody thinks you’re a fraud. There’s nothing _to_ like. Besides, most of the games are outdated.”

It sounded to Kaoru’s ears that he was trying to convince himself. Emi wasn’t having it.

“Arcades are places to have fun, right?” she said, snagging more of Kaoru’s fries. “Who cares if you win or lose or how badly you do or how great you are? It’s just games, in the end. I know there are these tournaments now, and you can win money for winning one, but that’s—it’s just a game.”

Shinya went quiet, staring down at his fries.

Emi said, “Please? Just play _one_ game with me? I really wasn’t kidding when I said I’ve never been to an arcade before, and I don’t want to go by myself, and my girl friends won’t want to go with me.”

“You’re being real weird about it, then,” Shinya said, then pointed to Kaoru. “You could have just gone with him, you know. When you were dating, or after, or—whenever. How come you have to go so bad now?”

Emi glanced, just for a second, at Kaoru. Shinya caught it and whirled on him. “What’d you tell her?” he snapped.

“Nothing,” Kaoru defended, reflexively, then thought for a moment. “Just that you’re good at games. Better than I am, at least; you lasted much longer than I could have against that Lionel with the equipment I had.”

“That’s because you suck at it.” He still dropped back into his seat, dragging his tray back to him; Emi had snagged more of his fries in the brief moment of confusion, and munched on them while she waited. She helped them polish off the last of them, then brushed the salt off her fingers, a proud little grin on her face at the looks Shinya was now throwing out the window.

“One game?” she asked.

Shinya scowled. “You’re paying.”

Kaoru, flabbergasted, was the last one out the door; Shinya and Emi disappeared into the arcade, Shinya’s hat pulled low and his shoulders squared, like a man marching to the gallows.

Kaoru hurried after them. Shinya hadn’t been in an arcade in years, but there was every chance one of his old rivals would recognize him, and challenge him, and then Shinya would lose—

And somehow, Kaoru couldn’t stand the thought of Shinya losing at a game of Gun About. He’d put the controller down because Kaoru dared him to, egged him to—and because his allowance shriveled up around the same time. He’d spent more of it on snacks to get him through until his mother was home than on games.

So, in a way, if Shinya lost, it wouldn’t be because he wasn’t talented. It wouldn’t be because he hadn’t thrown hundreds of hours of practice into it, either. It would be because Kaoru had stepped in and made a mess of things, with his dares and the kidnapping and Prim.

He forced himself to stop thinking it as he caught up to them, Emi looking around at the variety of machines and Shinya staring holes into the coin exchange.

“How about this one?” Emi asked, pointing out Personal Arena, a game that was, for some reason, still sitting in arcades ten years later. Shinya glanced at it, wrinkled his nose, and went back to the coin exchange.

“Have you ever even heard of fighting games?” Kaoru asked for him.

“Yeah! Street Brawler and all that, right?”

Well, it was a start—and it meant she knew just as much as Kaoru did about fighting games, which was next to nothing.

He eyed the machine—the buttons smoothed to a shiny slickness by oils, the paint chipped off the deck by the joystick, the way one joystick leaned slightly off-center—then was blocked as a gang of students settled in, coins rattling against the screens.

“If you don’t pick, we’ll be waiting here forever,” Shinya warned.

Kaoru scanned the rest of the machines, trailing after Emi—Dance Dance Rebellion, the footpads stomped into oblivion; Residential Evil, with its cartoony lawns marred by the trails of destruction wrought by runaway lawnmowers; pinball machines piled up in the corner; Pac-Mon and Alien Overlords and Tetras. Aside from Dance Dance Rebellion and the fighting games, none of them were actually meant for two players, let alone a one-on-one.

Shinya gravitated ever closer to the coin exchange the longer they were away, back kept to the arcade’s only Gun About machine. The pair of boys facing off on it cursed up a storm as Kaoru and Emi wandered back over; one of them nearly threw the controller on the ground as his character was swarmed and overrun by enemies.

“Hey!” Emi said, as he turned from the machine, furious. The controller dangled from its cord, the plastic on its barrel cracked from too many smacks against the stand. The kids ignored her and stormed from the arcade; Emi took up the controller, likely meaning to put it back, and then eyed the second stand next to her.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Kaoru told her, but she wasn’t listening.

“Let’s play this!” she decided. “Shinya, come on! Let’s play this one!”

Kaoru had a hard time believing she was his age.

Shinya turned, shoulders tucked around his ears, already glaring at her choice. “No,” he said. “Anything else. I don’t care what.”

“But it’s two-player!”

“No,” Shinya said, close to yelling. He drew several looks; some of them took second glances.

Kaoru wasn’t sure what they were whispering, but their wide-eyed looks of wonder didn’t leave much to the imagination; they were Shinya’s age, which meant he’d probably swindled them out of money in a match—or two, or three, or thirteen—back when he was still playing. Kaoru’s heart sank.

So much for get in, get out.

Emi bit her lip, one finger on the trigger of her controller. Then she squared her shoulders and said, “But you promised me one game. Anything I picked.”

“I never said that last part,” Shinya said. The whispers around them grew louder; the kids at the Personal Arena station paused their matches to look over. Shinya frowned even deeper at the noise. “Pick something else.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why?” Emi tapped the controller against a thigh. “Why not this one? It’s free; nobody’s using it. We won’t have to wait. We’ll play a quick game and then we’ll go. It’s even on my dime.”

“Typical.” Someone behind Kaoru snorted. “King still can’t pay for his own games.”

“Is that why he stopped?” someone else asked.

“How the hell should I know?”

“Emi, come on,” Kaoru pleaded. “Anything else should be fine, right?”

He didn’t know what was worse: Emi’s determination; the whispers that resounded around the room—“Emi? _That_ Emi? The one who lost the tournament to the King four years ago?”—that made him wonder why things like that stuck in their heads for so long; or the dark, murderous look that took over Shinya’s face in that moment.

He thought he’d been led into a trap. That was wrong. There was no way Emi could have known Shinya was the same boy who beat her four years ago—Kaoru hadn’t known she’d played games at all, ever—and Shinya never kept track of the people who came up to him, requesting matches. Young or old, male or female, sick or healthy—he gave them all his best, and if that wasn’t enough to win, Shinya would beat himself up over it.

Now, though— “Fine,” Shinya spat, storming over and standing in front of the other controller, sitting innocent in its stand. His hands twitched and flexed, and several times he moved to take it only to let them fall back to his sides.

“It’s not fine,” Kaoru said, turning to Emi. “Emi, please. We can play anything else in here—”

“I said it’s fine!” Shinya yelled, grabbing the controller. He held it like it was a hundred pounds of writhing, venomous snakes, grit his teeth, and glared at the screen.

“Back up, K,” Emi said. “We’re going to need space.”

With one last look at Shinya—determination and fear in the set of his shoulders, resolution in the teeth biting his lip—Kaoru did, stepping back just beyond the little platform the arcade had set up to prevent kids from getting hit with swinging cords. Failure soured the lingering taste of salt on his tongue; guilt sat heavy in his stomach.

Now, like before, like always, he was powerless to intervene. It was always Shinya taking on the brunt of the fighting—against his schoolyard bullies, against his mother, against the force that bound him and Prim—while Kaoru sat back and watched, forever a spectator.

Kaoru hated it.

He couldn’t focus on the match. The screen was a blur of motion; gunshots rang out in the quiet arcade. Every so often the crowd would make a noise of awe or disappointment that would pull his attention back to it, but by then whatever had been so surprising had passed.

No, Kaoru couldn’t watch the match; he watched Shinya instead, head finally level with the screen, his fingers tripping over the controller, palms clammy with sweat. Kaoru focused on his muttered curses that grew louder the longer the round went on, on the way he ducked and weaved despite not needing to, on the tears caught in the corners of his eyes. His breath gradually grew labored; the controller shook more and more.

Kaoru was watching, which meant Kaoru saw what happened at the end: the controller slipped from his grasp, just as Emi’s character came into view, gun poised to shoot. He made no move to grab it as Emi opened fire, frozen as still as a statue. He only came alive when the controller hit the stand, swinging on its cord.

The game’s announcer read out the results; the crowd behind Kaoru cheered, glad to see the King defeated at last.

It hurt too much to listen to. Kaoru pushed his feet forward as Emi turned to Shinya and said, “Good game, King.”

“I’m not a king,” Shinya said, without any bite to it. “Kings don’t lose.”

“Yeah, well.” Emi shrugged. “You would have won if you hadn’t lost your grip, there. I’d say you lost not because you don’t play anymore but because you—”

“Shut up,” Shinya said, and flinched when Kaoru laid a hand on his arm. He was shaking, and his lip was swollen, and he kept looking at the controller.

“Are you okay?” Kaoru asked, even though it was obvious he wasn’t.

Shinya didn’t answer, just ducked his head farther.

“That was cruel,” Kaoru said, not looking at Emi. _This_ was the girl he’d dated? _This_ was what lay hidden under her bubbly personality?

“Why?” Emi asked. “Like I said before, it’s just a game.”

Shinya, done with the conversation and the arcade, slipped out of Kaoru’s grasp and was out the door before he could blink. Kaoru shot a glare over his shoulder—Emi looked genuinely confused, almost hurt, and his heart lurched with instant regret—and raced after him, hoping the crowd would keep Emi away with their congratulations and requests for matches.

Everyone would want the chance to play the girl who beat the King, after all. No one would think twice about the deposed King, trudging out of his domain, thoroughly bested. They’d be happier if he never showed his face again. Likely Shinya never planned on ever stepping foot inside an arcade or game store for the rest of his life.

Kaoru, in between thoughts of what it waste it was and how it was his fault, caught up to him in an alley by the movie theater. It was too hard not to wrap him up in his arms, so he did just that, letting Shinya rest his head on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Kaoru said, over and over again, as if it would make this better. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know what she wanted to do. I swear.”

Shinya, after a long while, reached his hands up and clung to his coat.

Kaoru wondered, for a brief moment, what it meant that this was the basis of their relationship: comfort and clinging and the rightness he felt when Shinya touched him, as if he were finally complete.

Maybe Shinya was right. Maybe they should stop. But it also felt too monumental to even bear thinking of.

He couldn’t be sure of what was right anymore, save for Shinya in his arms.

“I know,” Shinya said, after an even longer while where they stood in the alley and let the pedestrians on the street go by, Shinya blind to it all, Kaoru with his head tilted to the sky, absorbing as much of the feeling as possible. Shinya would leave Tokyo altogether soon, and Kaoru wanted— _needed_ —to take every chance he could get to hold him close and show him he was wanted. Needed. Loved.

Whether their love for each other was the same or not.

* * *

The slight tremor deep in Shinya’s core hadn’t abated by the time he and Kaoru parted ways, and he felt it all the way back to Leblanc, and even days later. Okuma and his remaining friends—nearly all of them, aside from Higuchi—took over his lunch hour, Okuma demanding to spend as much time with him as he could before he left.

He was beginning to doubt he ever would when the investigators let him know the case had gone through. A judge would be seeing it in a few days. He didn’t have to be there.

He went, sitting in the front row in his wrinkled school uniform, all of his friends pressed against him. Kaoru held his hand throughout, keeping a wary eye on the door, in case Shinya’s mom burst through, late and with a ready excuse on her lips.

She didn’t.

It didn’t make the shaking, trembling feeling go away. He wondered if it ever would, or if he’d spend the rest of his life anticipating danger that wasn’t there; but, like the guns in Gun About, his mom wasn’t a threat. Not really.

Not until he heard there was another waiting period as yet more details were finalized—the investigators wanted him to finish the school year, there were various records his uncle had to be authorized access to—and his head spun with it all.

“I’m really leaving,” he told Kaoru one day, when the air had warmed enough that they’d draped their heavy coats over their arms on a long, meandering walk through the streets. A street vendor was frying up takoyaki, taking advantage of the crowd. Girls in too-short skirts passed out adverts for cafes and clubs; Kaoru’s bag was stuffed to bulging with tissue packets.

Kaoru wasn’t looking at him. He was staring at the sidewalk, a strangled smile on his face. His thumb wore a blister on the back of Shinya’s hand. “Yeah.”

Shinya didn’t have to ask if Kaoru would miss him; it was obvious, from the way Kaoru kept making time for them to do nothing together, in the same way that Okuma wanted his lunch hour. They were both taking all the time they could get, and they were all counting down the days until he was gone.

“K,” a familiar voice said, and Shinya stopped in his tracks. Emi stood in their path, a shopping bag from the nearby stationery store in one hand.

Kaoru’s grip tightened. “Emi,” he said.

“And Shinya, the King,” she said, giving Shinya a smile, acting like she hadn’t beaten him in Gun About weeks ago.

“I’m not a king,” Shinya protested, though it sounded weak.

“Sure you are,” Emi said, and would have gone on if Kaoru didn’t interrupt.

“What do you want, Emi?”

“To say sorry,” was her answer, with a raised brow, “like I keep telling you? I don’t know what happened, and I shouldn’t have pushed you so much, Shinya, but I”—she laughed, mockingly, at herself—“I’ve never been good at reading hints when I focus. I saw you and thought, _Maybe now’s my chance!_ Even though it was obvious you’d stopped for a reason, even if it was lack of funds. I shouldn’t have. So, I’m sorry. And I shouldn’t have lied about never going to an arcade before.”

“It’s fine,” he said, before Kaoru could argue. Shinya had agreed to the match. Shinya had wanted to be over whatever this weird fear of guns was, because that’s what it was: he couldn’t stand them anymore. The only exceptions seemed to be the ones Mr. Iwai carried, in pieces and packed away in boxes.

Because no one could pick them up and point them at him.

“It’s not fine,” Emi said. “I’ve never seen anyone shake that badly just holding a controller. I could hear the cord rattling over the crowd. And—and it wasn’t really my victory anyway. You froze. You would have won otherwise. And—”

“If I’d frozen in the tournament, would you feel this bad?” Shinya snapped.

“Yes,” she said, without hesitating. “I _would_ feel this bad. I’d feel this bad beating anybody. I want to fight and win against you without a—a handicap. I want to fight and beat the King, not his shadow, who—who cowers and shrinks back from the throne. Understand?”

She sniffed, and dug through her purse, pulling out a tissue to dab at her eyes with. While she blew her nose Shinya said, “I guess.”

He wouldn’t feel right beating somebody like him, either. Not now, not then. They’d be treating him with kid gloves. They’d be underestimating him, despite his prowess, despite his rank.

Not that it mattered. He wasn’t a king anymore.

“Good,” Emi said, and dug back through her purse again. “I’ve been keeping this on me ever since, in case I ran into you again. Pretty dumb—Tokyo’s just too big for that to happen—but here we are, and I’m glad I did.” She grinned. “Close your eyes, okay?”

Beside him, Kaoru frowned. “Emi, what are you—”

“It’s nothing bad, I promise. No more games—not until the King here is ready for them. Please?”

Shinya didn’t want to, but—it felt good to have a rival that didn’t hate his guts, that saw him not as a kid but as a worthy contender, that wanted him to get better rather than sink into obscurity. She’d gone out of her way to apologize for an unfair match and for strong-arming him into it. So he closed his eyes on the gray Tokyo street and Emi’s pastel-pink jacket and her sudden, beaming smile.

She put something on his head. A hat, it felt like, like the one he’d worn in elementary school, the one he’d earned as a tournament participation prize. He’d worn it everywhere, swearing to get good enough that he’d never need a consolation prize ever again.

“There!” Emi said, and he reached up and snatched it off.

It _was_ the same hat: bright red, bright yellow lettering, a bit dusty with age. **GET SMOKED** , it declared, and Shinya felt a residual wave of embarrassment wash over him. He’d liked this hat. He’d worn this hat everywhere.

This hat marked him as a pompous ass. He was sure of it.

“I know you had one before,” Emi said as he stared in horror at it, “but I haven’t seen you wear it. Maybe you think you don’t deserve to anymore; maybe it’s the king’s crown to you. But, whenever you’re ready, you can wear it again. I’ll know the King’s back when you do.”

“I…” he said, but the words stopped in his throat. That horrible, shaking feeling was back. Be the King again? Was she serious? Humiliate himself in front of hundreds or thousands of people with his insistence on playing a game he couldn’t stand anymore?

 _But you were doing so well_ , said a little voice in the back of his mind. _Up until that last encounter, you were doing so well. Maybe you can do it. Maybe you can overcome it._

Then: _Prim’s out there, doing her best to get over what_ you _did to_ her _._

“Thanks,” he settled on.

“Don’t worry about it,” Emi said. “I—I know I’m done with tournaments and all that, but, someday… Someday, maybe we can just play as friends.”

“Yeah,” he said.

Friends. He was gaining an awful lot of them, lately, more than he ever thought he’d have. Okuma and Sakurazawa and Honma and Ogata. That girl from Math Club who’d begun sitting with him in the teacher’s lounge after school, just so he wouldn’t be alone if Mr. Mori wasn’t there. Emi.

Mr. Iwai. Mr. Mori.

Kaoru.

“Cool,” Emi said, glancing at her watch. “I should be going now, if I want to catch my train. I’ll see you guys later!”

He could barely watch her leave, shop bag swinging, skirt tangling in her legs as a breeze blew by, but he did, and he and Kaoru turned back to the sidewalk.

“Are you sure?” Kaoru asked, motioning to the hat still in Shinya’s hand.

“I guess,” Shinya said. It was the brightest thing on the whole street, bright as freshly spilled blood, and it swung in his hand like Emi’s bag. After a few more blocks, he said, “Hey, Kaoru.”

“Yeah?”

 _Was it Prim’s wish or yours?_ He wanted to ask, but didn’t, because maybe it was his own. Maybe the deepest wish of his heart had been to make friends who didn’t give a damn how crazy his mom was, or how obsessed he was with Gun About, or how little he knew of the world. They were all in the same boat he was, paddling without any idea as to which way to go.

Shinya supposed he didn’t mind that one bit. They could find the way together.

“I’m pretty hungry,” he said instead, and Kaoru laughed for the first time in days. “Let’s stop somewhere?”

“All this fast food is bad for you, you know,” Kaoru chided.

“I didn’t say it had to be a fast food joint,” Shinya said. “It could be your place. We can make stir-fry, or fried rice, or curry—”

“Still sounds like fast food to me.”

“—or hamburger steak, or—or whatever,” he finished, squeezing Kaoru’s hand. He didn’t want to let go, ever, but he would have to sooner than he thought. For his own good, and for his mom’s own good.

 _I don’t want to say goodbye yet_ , he thought.

From the look on his face, Kaoru thought the same. “Okay,” he said. “My place. But we’ll have to do some shopping first.”

Shopping. More reasons to keep holding Kaoru’s hand, despite the looks it garnered them. More time to spend with Kaoru.

“Sure,” he said.


	8. The Confrontation, Part Two

Shinya’s moving day loomed ever closer as the days warmed. Heavy coats gave way to jackets and sweaters, and their long, meandering walks always wound up including dinner at Kaoru’s. Sometimes Mr. Iwai was there, but most of the time he was at his shop, giving dark looks to the teenagers who wandered in.

Like Shinya did, the day before he was set to move.

Mr. Iwai glowered, even after recognition came and went. “Shouldn’t you be packing, kid?”

“I already am,” Shinya said with a shrug. He’d picked out a cheap suitcase and stuffed all of his things inside. It didn’t amount to much. Two bags were all he had to his name; there were probably toddlers with more.

But that didn’t matter. He was leaving Tokyo. When he came back surely he’d have more to bring with him: new clothes and books and memories. Maybe he’d finally try out one of those math tournaments Mr. Mori was always pushing him to enter. Maybe he’d win.

“Then what’re ya doing here for?”

Shinya dug through his bag, pulled out the gift, and plopped it on the counter. Mr. Iwai glared at it.

“It’s a thank you present,” Shinya explained, as Mr. Iwai continued to stare at it as if he’d plopped a dead fish on the glass. He shoved his hands in his pockets, fingers running over the keys inside: Leblanc, Kaoru’s house, his mom’s apartment.“I figured you wouldn’t want one, but then I thought I should, anyway. I dunno how much good it’ll be, but Kaoru says it’s the thought that counts.”

Mr. Iwai sighed. “I shouldn’ta taught him that.”

Shinya nodded, understanding. Useless gifts were the worst. Useless gifts only given because of a sense of obligation, with next to no understanding of what the receiver might actually want? The Worst. “It’s just some tools,” he said, nudging it a bit closer. “Sandpaper and clippers and stuff. Kaoru said you were saying some of yours wore down.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Iwai sighed, then scrubbed his face. “But where’d you get the money for this?”

“I live above a coffee shop, remember?”

And he liked working there, in the slow hours in between rushes. It was quiet, and the owner let him use his kitchen, and sometimes that part-timer taught him some spice combination or cooking trick. Every time he showed it off to Kaoru, he got this strange, wistful look on his face, as if he was counting down the days until they never saw each other again.

Mr. Iwai’s brow scrunched with confusion. “I just do easy stuff,” Shinya assured him. “I sweep, and wipe down the chairs and tables. Sometimes I get to grind the beans.”

The part-timer had gotten a weird look on his face when Shinya learned how to do that. The owner had laughed at it and pushed him back into the kitchen.

“The beans, huh,” Mr. Iwai said, finally pulling the gift close. Shinya had wrapped it up in loose sheets of notebook paper, and there was far too much tape, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get it to look as crisp and clean as the boxes from the store. “Geez, kid. You’re makin’ me feel like I’ve done somethin’ to earn this. Lookin’ out for kids—that’s what adults are supposed to do.”

“So, what?” Shinya asked. “You don’t want one person to thank you for not fucking it up?”

“It ain’t that, kid—”

“What is it, then? Should I not find some way to say, _Hey, thanks so much for teaching me all that useful stuff! Thanks for letting me sit in your house even when Kaoru wasn’t there! Thanks for—for talking to me, like I’m a_ person _!_ ”

He spat the last word, aware of how shrill his voice was getting, and how it cracked. Mr. Iwai still looked uneasy, with the sloppily-wrapped gift on his counter. One of his fingers still rested on it, like a smudge.

“So what if it’s your job to take care of kids?” Shinya said. “That doesn’t mean you have to do it. That doesn’t mean I can’t be grateful, either. Kids can give their parents presents too—”

He slammed his jaw shut with a click of teeth. Fucking hell, he hadn’t meant to say that—that Mr. Iwai was a better father than the one Shinya had never known, that he thought of Mr. Iwai like that. He was Kaoru’s dad, not Shinya’s.

But he’d been there when Shinya’s mom wasn’t. He’d listened when Shinya’s mom refused to. When he’d needed money for a field trip, Mr. Iwai had suddenly found a few chores that needed doing and had paid Shinya to do them, Kaoru hanging back with a knowing grin on his face.

He stammered out the rest. “So—so I can give you a present. As a—a thank you. For helping me, even though we’re not family.”

“Whaddaya mean we ain’t family?” Mr. Iwai asked. His eyes narrowed. “Kaoru—he hasn’t—”

When he broke off, Shinya waited for him to speak back up, but he didn’t, glancing around the shop as if searching for something else to do. “What about Kaoru?” Shinya asked.

For another second it seemed as if he wouldn’t answer, shaking his head, his lips twitching, but—

Mr. Iwai laughed, deep and gravelly, and for a split second Shinya’s knees turned to water. He took a few steps back and propped himself up on a display, waiting out the sudden surge of fire in his veins. It was shame; it had to be. Mr. Iwai was laughing at him and Shinya couldn’t imagine why.

Shinya fingered a key. Left pocket. Kaoru’s house, with the worn-out couch and the beat-up table and the grease that never came off the hood over the stove. Kaoru’s house, with the finicky spigot in the bath no matter how many times maintenance came by to take a look. Kaoru’s house: Mr. Iwai in his recliner, pretending to read his magazine when his eyes were trained on the TV screen; Kaoru by Shinya’s side on the couch, cajoling him into taking another crack at the Lionel monster in the game, swearing he had almost won that last time.

“That kid of mine,” Mr. Iwai said, when his laughing spell abated and Shinya was thoroughly embarrassed. “Can’t tell nobody nothin’, not even when it’s important. I bet if ya ask him he’ll tell ya, but for all of his pushin’ he doesn’t like bein’ pushed much himself. Maybe he’s just been thinkin’ it over. In any case, I left it up to him, and I ain’t about to ruin the surprise.”

“The surprise?”

If it was the good kind of surprise, Kaoru would have told him by now. He was terrible at keeping secrets—except for his girlfriend, but it didn’t feel like that mattered much anymore. He would have told Shinya by now, if it was good.

Which meant it had to be bad. Shinya could only imagine that it was relief that he was leaving, that the burden was finally being shipped off, that he had never actually been wanted. He was a problem child, a troublemaker; didn’t everyone say so? Why shouldn’t Mr. Iwai be glad to see him leave?

 _That can’t be true!_ screamed some part of him as Mr. Iwai rounded the counter, concern on his face. Shinya’s eyes burned with a sudden onslaught of tears; Mr. Iwai reached one rough, calloused hand out and Shinya ducked from it, his hair catching on a display peg.

“Kid,” Mr. Iwai said. “C’mon, talk to me. You know I ain’t that great with—with feelings and all that, but it can’t hurt, can it?”

Shinya shook his head. The peg scratched at his scalp like his mom’s nails.

It pissed him off: the peg, the sensation, the reminder; crying like a baby in Mr. Iwai’s shop just because his feelings were hurt. If Mr. Iwai was going to be glad to see him leave, he would say so, and he hadn’t.

So Shinya asked, “Are you going to miss me?”

Mr. Iwai sighed, but didn’t hesitate to say, “Yeah, I am. You’re practically a part of the family by now. I’m surprised you even had to ask, kid.”

“I have a name.”

“Yeah, I know. Maybe when Kaoru gets off his ass I’ll use it.”

Family. Kaoru.

(Shinya forced down a very sudden thought of proposal. It would be nice, and it would be enough reason for Mr. Iwai to keep it a secret, right?

But Kaoru didn’t like him like that. Kaoru never said so. Shinya would never believe it until he said it himself.)

But he liked the thought, being family with Mr. Iwai. They practically were already—was that the surprise? Making it official, somehow?

Shinya had Mr. Iwai and Kaoru, and Uncle Jiro and Aunt Fumie. No matter what, he was an Oda by blood—but what did that mean? That he could never leave them? That he could never decide that the Oda name wasn’t one he wanted? What had it ever brought him but trouble?

“Do you mean it?” he forced out, through a throat that didn’t seem to get enough air, with a tongue that seemed too thick and clumsy to form the words.

But Mr. Iwai understood. He nodded, just once, reaching one large hand out to pat Shinya on the shoulder. He hesitated right before he made contact, as if he, too, was feeling out the boundaries of whatever this was, now.

He went on: “You’ve done so much for Kaoru. Sometimes I wonder what he’d be like, if he’d never met ya, and I don’t—I _can’t_ think of what that might be like. You, without Kaoru. Kaoru, without you. It’s like—it’s like he was a shell of a person, or like he was half-full of whatever makes us people. He’d never made friends before you came along. Then you were all he could talk about, and all of a sudden he was going out on all his days off, actin’ like the damn kid he shoulda been, instead of some old man locked up in his apartment all damn day. ‘N last week he comes to me an’ says he wants to change his major. He wants to help kids like you who ain’t got nobody to turn to, who can’t even trust their own parents to take care of them, ‘n he mighta thought of it, but you put the idea there, kid. Shinya. You gave him a childhood. Now you’re givin’ him a future, too.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Shinya insisted, mind still whirling. He had a family that wanted him. He had _two_ families that wanted him. He gave Kaoru a future.

“Maybe not, but”—Mr. Iwai’s lips quirked into a ghost of a smile—“sometimes ya don’t gotta do nothin’. Sometimes ya just gotta sit there and be somebody to someone. That’s all anybody needs.”

“Like you did,” Shinya said. It was more of a wheeze, but Mr. Iwai paid it no mind.

“Yeah, like I did,” he said with a nod. He seemed ready to say more, then shook his head, thinking better of it—and that was fine. Shinya had more than enough to think about, now, and a whole year to be doing it in.

 _Or more_ , he had to remind himself. A year or more. However long he needed to stay with Uncle Jiro, away from his mom—but also away from Kaoru and Mr. Iwai. His family.

 _His_.

“Kid,” said Mr. Iwai, his face carefully blank but his eyes filled with concern, as another hot tear slid down Shinya’s cheek.

“Fuck,” he muttered, wiping at it. When did he become such a crybaby? Was it that part-timer’s fault, for crying at the drop of a hat mid-shift? Did it have something to do with his love for Kaoru? Was it as simple as there being something wrong with him?

Nothing could be wrong with him. He was fine. He was fine, but—

“Gimme a sec,” Mr. Iwai said, then went to the door and drew down his shutter and locked it. Without the light from the alley streaming in, the store turned cold and lifeless under the fluorescents, Mr. Iwai’s face as set and unforgiving as stone, save for the stubble on his chin. He wrapped an arm around Shinya’s shoulders and led him to the back room, packed with crates in desperate need of dusting and order forms tacked to the walls and a desk piled high with tools and boxes with their contents spilling out.

Stupidly, it was more familiar than the shop space: Shinya had spent long hours in the back room doing his homework when Kaoru wasn’t available and Mr. Iwai had to tend shop before Kaoru had given him a key to his house. There was the spiderweb in the corner connecting to the bare, flickering bulb hanging from a wire. There was the weird stain on the wall almost completely covered by the desk. There was the chip in the chair that Shinya had run his hand over a hundred times, the same chair Mr. Iwai was sitting him down on before taking his own seat on a crate.

Shinya sat there for a while, crying, feeling utterly stupid. He was leaving his family. He was leaving to be with his family, but they were people he barely knew, people he’d only met in person once. Uncle Jiro had looked a bit at a loss as to what to do with his new nephew, while Aunt Fumie had at least been straight with him the few times he’d talked to her. He was sure they were nice people, and that they’d get along—but they weren’t Mr. Iwai and Kaoru.

“Sorry,” he said, when the last of the burn in his eyes faded. His face felt raw, like he’d scraped at it with sandpaper, and he scratched at it.

“What for?”

“You closed up shop ‘cause I started crying like a baby,” Shinya said.

“Yeah?” Mr. Iwai asked. “And why’d ya do that?”

Shinya scratched some more until Mr. Iwai gripped his wrist and pulled his hand away, still with that look in his eyes, like he knew but wanted Shinya to say it.

Shinya scowled at the stain on the wall. “You said—we’re practically family. But I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Yeah, you are.” Mr. Iwai shifted on his crate, the wood complaining loudly. “You changin’ your mind? Gettin’ cold feet?”

Shinya shook his head. “They’re not you and Kaoru. I barely know them. I know I have to go; I know it’s too late to change anything, and I know that the state would want me with my blood relatives, but—why couldn’t you have said that sooner? That we’re family?”

“It ain’t ever been up to me. It’s been up to Kaoru, and to you—”

“It _has_ been up to you!” Shinya interrupted, furious. “You didn’t have to be his dad! You didn’t have to raise him like he was your kid! You didn’t have to take him in, but you did! You did, and you decided that it was up to you to make it all right! Because—” Damn it all, he was crying again, squeezing tiny little trickles through his eyes. Each one stung like a thousand needle pricks. No wonder his face felt like shit. “It _was_ up to you,” he finished, weakly. “It was up to you, and you took Kaoru in. And me, too, when I came around with nothing better to do but nowhere to go. You could’ve turned me out on the streets. You could’ve told me your shop wasn’t a place for kids, and you could’ve been mean about it. But you didn’t. It was up to you.”

“Shit,” Mr. Iwai said, with a faint chuckle. Laughing at himself. “Listen to you, kid.”

“You’d better listen to me,” Shinya remarked, though it fell flat without any heat to it. His voice was rough and scratchy, and he’d left Kaoru waiting on Central Street. How long had it been? Five minutes? Fifteen? Thirty?

Kaoru would wait for him all night, if this went on. He sniffed one last time, grimacing at the soreness in his throat. He stood. “I should go. Kaoru’s waiting for me.”

“Yeah?” Mr. Iwai said, but stood, too. He glanced around the back room, lingering on the cobweb’s dusty tail. He shifted on his feet, shoved his hands in his pockets, then nodded. “Help me finish closin’ up and we’ll all go out somewhere. You pick, kid. Call it a—a farewell party. From your Tokyo family.”

“I don’t need one of those,” Shinya said.

Mr. Iwai snorted. “Maybe not, but I don’t think Kaoru’d agree with ya. That damn kid’s always lookin’ for a way to feed you. It’s probably his thing.”

“His thing?”

“Come out to eat with us and I’ll tell ya all about it.”

Shinya scowled, wanting to refuse but knowing he couldn’t: Kaoru was waiting, and it was easier to ask him anything half the time than it was to ask his dad, with his gruffness honed in the yakuza. Mr. Iwai could evade a question when he wanted to, and he wasn’t the talkative type in the first place.

So instead he asked, “Anywhere? You mean it?”

Mr. Iwai only nodded. Shinya took it.

* * *

The school bell rung, startling Shinya out of his thoughts. Everything he had was packed. Kaoru and Mr. Iwai were bringing his suitcase to the station, leaving Shinya with a schoolbag so stuffed with books that it was nearly splitting open.

Okuma latched onto his neck as he tried to shove his textbook inside. The most he was doing was mangling the paper. “You’re really leaving!” Okuma cried, loud in his ear, prompting several of their classmates to look over. Most went back to to what they were doing without Shinya’s glare to hurry them along.

“You’re heavy,” Shinya said, finally pushing the textbook in. Then he went looking for Mr. Mori’s gift, wrapped much like Mr. Iwai’s had been.

Shinya was never going to get any better at wrapping presents, was he?

“Don’t say that,” Okuma whined, and pressed his gelled bangs into Shinya’s cheek. “How am I supposed to watch dutifully over you until you board the train?”

“By not getting in his face, like the rest of us,” Sakurazawa said, dragging Okuma back by the collar. Honma and Ogata hovered by the door, Ogata kicking at dust on the floor and Honma intent on another book in her hands. Sakurazawa gave Shinya a curt nod, slung his arm over Okuma’s shoulders, and all but carried him out of the room.

“We’ll be waiting at the gates!” was his last remark before the door shut. Shinya’s fingers closed around Mr. Mori’s gift.

It was oddly difficult not to care when this was his last trek through the halls. It was weird: the high school he’d be attending wouldn’t be any different, maybe a bit smaller, the floorboards more worn down by time. Any high school he’d be going to would be the same: different, on some level or another. He wouldn’t know where any of the rooms were regardless of where he was going.

But he couldn’t help taking in the way the sun streamed in through the windows, and the way a group of boys chased each other down the halls while the girls looked on, armed with brooms and dustpans. He couldn’t help feeling as if the way his footsteps echoed in the stairwells would be different, too, as he grew bigger and heavier—taller and broader and with more weight to him, more muscle mass. Like Kaoru.

Did Kaoru feel like this, walking through his high school for the last time?

(It wasn’t that hard to imagine. Kaoru was the sentimental type. Maybe it had rubbed off on Shinya.)

By the time he made it to the teacher’s lounge, he was nearly sick with longing. Like Mr. Iwai and Kaoru and discovering they were his family, he was just realizing that these stupid fucking halls meant something to him—but all those opportunities were lost, and it was his fault.

He knocked and entered, gift in hand and shoulder screaming at the weight hanging off it. Mr. Mori was at his desk, digging through drawers, cleaning out pencil stubs and eraser shavings and answer sheets for old tests. The newspaper, flipped to the puzzle section, hung off the edge, threatening to fall off entirely. Shinya plopped his gift down on it, took a look, and said, “You got this one wrong.”

“Not even a hello, Oda?” Mr. Mori quipped, without looking.

“Hello,” Shinya said. “You got this one wrong.”

Groaning, Mr. Mori straightened. He rubbed at his back, looked at his newspaper, and noticed the badly-wrapped gift on top. He picked it up; Shinya caught the newspaper.

“What’s this?” Mr. Mori asked, examining it.

“A thank-you gift. Kaoru said I should.”

“Kaoru—oh, your friend,” Mr. Mori said. Unlike Mr. Iwai, he didn’t seem ready to shove it back at him. “Well, thank you. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.”

“You’re not gonna tell me it’s improper or something?”

“But it’s not,” was the response. “Lots of kids come by and give gifts to their favorite teachers at the end of the year. See?”

He nodded to a desk in the corner, overflowing with cards and bags of cookies wrapped with bows and a very irritated, very handsome student teacher sitting behind it all. He seemed to be contemplating how to burn it all without offending anyone. Shinya wondered if he was cut out for teaching.

“So, it’s perfectly fine,” Mr. Mori said. “Although, knowing you, it’s not cookies, is it?”

“If I knew you wanted cookies, maybe I would have made some,” Shinya said with a shrug.

“I think I’ll be perfectly happy with this.” He dug through his drawers again, coming back up with a pair of scissors. “Do you mind?”

“No.” Yes, but it didn’t much matter. Shinya was leaving. He wouldn’t have to look Mr. Mori in the eye after today, now matter how awkward things got, or how much offense Mr. Mori took to his gift.

Shinya hoped he liked it.

“Oh,” Mr. Mori said, as he pulled away too much tape to reveal the sudoku book. It had tear-away pages, so he could work on one problem at a time without lugging the whole thing around, and the best part was— “Beginner level?”

“’Cause you’re so bad at them.”

“Maybe it’s not that I’m bad at them—”

“It’s that I’m too good,” Shinya finished with him, and sighed. He ducked his head. “I keep telling you—I just know where they go. It’s not some crazy genius thing.”

“That’s exactly what it is, Oda,” argued Mr. Mori. He flopped the book at him. “To the rest of us, ‘just knowing’ _is_ genius. Most people can’t look at puzzle and know exactly which numbers need to go where—most people can’t even solve equations without working through the steps. Some can, but not many. I wish you’d realize you have talent.”

Shinya grunted, tired of the same argument. Mr. Mori always liked to sit around calling him a genius, but it didn’t mean anything if Shinya had nothing to prove it. They were empty words.

“Speaking of, once you’re in high school you’ll need to start showing your work,” Mr. Mori went on. “Not every teacher will give you full credit when you only put down the answer. Alright?”

“Yeah,” Shinya said. “I know.”

“You’ll be fine,” Mr. Mori said, as if sensing his newfound reluctance to leave. First Mr. Iwai, and now Mr. Mori—they had to be mind-readers. It was the only possible explanation.

“Yeah,” Shinya said again, a bit more choked up. “I know.”

If he fled the room and the building, well, no one would ever see him again after today. What did it matter?

And if he took a bit of comfort in the arm Okuma slung over his shoulders on their walk to the station, well—no one would see him again, after today. Not for a year or more.

What did it matter?

* * *

When they arrived at the station, there was already a crowd gathered: Kaoru and Mr. Iwai; the investigator duo; the owner of Leblanc, Futaba, and her mother. Futaba waved as they neared, looking odd in her uniform blazer and hoodie.

“S’up, nerd,” she said, prodding at him.

Shinya grunted. The uptight woman checked her watch just as a train squealed to a stop, dislodging passengers. Uncle Jiro and Aunt Fumie emerged, overwhelmed at the noise and bustle, Aunt Fumie a bit green, Uncle Jiro pale with the kind of nervous energy that said he hadn’t eaten much that day. Aunt Fumie forced a protein bar into his hand, and he ate mechanically, nervously, glancing around for signs that said he couldn’t.

“It’s going to be late when you get there, huh,” Ogata commented.

“Yeah,” Shinya said. They’d had to leave stupidly early last time to get there sometime before dark, and that was before the bus ride into the town proper and Uncle Jiro’s car ride out to the house. Shinya guessed it would be dawn by the time they got back.

“What are you going to do for such a long train ride?”

“Sleep.” Or try to, anyway. Although he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, that didn’t mean that the noise wouldn’t keep him awake.

“You’ve still got that book of puzzles, right?” Okuma asked, remembering the book Shinya had been working through on their first ride there.

“I finished that ages ago,” Shinya told him, as Uncle Jiro and Aunt Fumie finally made their way over. They traded bows with the investigators; Uncle Jiro fumbled in his pocket for a business card to trade with theirs, and once that was over Shinya got dragged into it.

“We’ve got some time if you have any more goodbyes to say,” Aunt Fumie told him, taking his schoolbag and frowning at the weight of it. Uncle Jiro took it from her, settling it on his shoulder with ease, then took the suitcase Kaoru handed over.

Uncle Jiro glanced up at the clock. “Quite a bit of time, actually.”

“Hush, dear,” Aunt Fumie said.

Okuma laughed silently at the cowed expression on Uncle Jiro’s face. “Then we’ve got plenty of time, right?”

“Sure, if you stop hogging him,” Sakurazawa said, once again dragging Okuma off Shinya. His shoulders felt impossibly light without the weight to drag him down.

“Good luck at your new school,” Honma said, and from her faint smile, it was sincere. Ogata echoed her, and then they peeled off to one side to watch.

Sakurazawa went next, Okuma shoved under his arm in a headlock. “Guess I should say thanks for dealing with this guy”—he jostled Okuma, who complained loudly—“for so long. You’re not so bad, once you stop glaring at everybody. You’ll make friends there, too. Take care.”

“I’ll come visit,” Okuma promised. “Every weekend—”

Sakurazawa shook him. “No, you won’t.”

“Every _other_ weekend—”

“No.”

“On Golden Week and summer break, then!” Okuma shouted, fighting to get out of his grip without ruining his hair. When he stopped flailing uselessly to look Shinya in the eyes, there was determination there. He’d visit as often as he could manage or he’d die trying. “Promise! Okay?”

“Yeah,” Shinya said, unsure what else might be appropriate. He couldn’t promise to visit them—the investigators had made that very clear—but just the thought of Okuma spending whole weekends on trains and buses just to see him made him feel… ecstatic. Euphoric. No matter where he went, he wouldn’t be alone.

“I think I’d like to see it, too,” Honma commented, almost to herself, and Ogata was quick to agree.

“Don’t worry, we’ll keep him in line,” Sakurazawa promised, giving Okuma another shake and hauling him off to the side.

“What a rowdy bunch,” Leblanc’s owner muttered, almost to himself. Shinya turned his way and found the older man wearing a wistful smile on his face. He shook his head lightly, staring off after the four schoolkids.

“Moving somewhere new can be startling at first,” said Futaba’s mom, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She was smiling too, watching the proceedings as Ogata tried in vain to stop an argument between Okuma and Sakurazawa from breaking out. “But you do get used to it, after a while. Try not to get so absorbed you forget to call or write, alright?”

“Um, sure,” Shinya said.

Futaba bounded forward. “Okay, I kinda-sorta got something for you but it’s not ready yet so we’ll be mailing it later when it’s done, so—”

“Slow down, Futaba,” both of the adults said, at nearly the same time, and Futaba took a deep breath that would have been comical if she hadn’t been blue in the face.

Futaba started up again. “When I told Inari that you were Prim’s player, he was kinda surprised I managed to find one. Then he started asking all sorts of questions like, were you okay and what all that stuff in the final boss fight meant and—but I didn’t tell him anything! Just that you maybe, kind of, missed Prim a little.” She shoved her hands in her hoodie pockets, trying to look him in the eye and failing—she was focusing on the lamppost somewhere behind him. “She’s the reason you’ve got a great friend. So he’s painting you a portrait, but between all his other work it’s not done yet. We’ll send it to you when it is.”

She scuffed her foot. “He also said he wished there was a way to send Prim one of you, but tech’s not that advanced yet. Someday, though.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. If anyone could do it, it would be Futaba. But—“Why a portrait?”

“’Cause portraits are ‘special,’” she said, tugging her hands out of her pockets long enough to air quote. “But I think you’ll like it. His other ones turned out really well.”

There were so many questions he could ask, but Shinya held off—they would have time for questions and answers later, over long, boring afternoons. One day he’d share everything about Prim with these people who only knew one side of her—the bad, manipulated side, the side Shinya had controlled for months—and he’d learn everything about their Akira—that fierce, determined emperor who dared to help the very same people who’d taken him from his home.

Shinya doubted he could ever do the same.

“I’ll keep some wall space clear for it,” he said, and Futaba grinned, snagging her parents by the arm and already chattering about dinner.

(He’d told Mr. Sakura thank you a few days ago, trying to push a gift over the counter. Mr. Sakura had pushed it away, saying something along the lines of, “You helped out Akira. That’s more than enough thanks for me.”

Shinya had wondered what that was about, but left the gift tucked into a corner of the attic. Maybe Akira would like it, if he ever came home.)

Mr. Iwai gave him a brief nod—unconcerned to the untrained eye, but so full of worry to Shinya’s that it almost hurt to look at—and nudged Kaoru forward, who’d hung back, silent as the grave, throughout the past five minutes.

“Shinya, I—” Kaoru said, but stopped. His hands twitched at his sides; unlike Futaba, who’d shoved hers in her pockets, he reached out.

It was so easy to fall into his arms again, even with all the others watching. They clung to each other; Shinya felt the thunder of Kaoru’s pulse under his hands and realized his was probably racing, too.

“There’s something I forgot to tell you,” Kaoru said, tacking on a laugh at the end.

“What?”

“I think I love you too.” He paused, took a breath, gripped even tighter. “Not the same way you do. But I do love you. If—when you come back, if you still love me—”

“I’ll always love you, you moron,” Shinya grumbled, and Kaoru laughed again. “You’re my first—my first everything. I can’t forget that. I’ll never forget that.”

“Still,” Kaoru said. “When you come back, if you still—”

He was interrupted by an awful screeching noise coming from the station entrance. Shinya hurried to disentangle himself as heels pounded closer; Mr. Iwai moved to block them, fast enough that he was a blur out of the corner of Shinya’s eye. By the time he turned, the screaming had started.

“Shinya!” his mom cried, throwing her weight against Mr. Iwai’s arm uselessly. “Shinya! Get off him! Get _off_ me! _Shinya_!”

The last word was terrifying; it promised pain, and another round with the scissors in the kitchen, and her nails scraping along his scalp like she could yank the hair right off him.

“Ms. Oda,” said the gentler investigator.

“Hanae?” Uncle Jiro wheezed, mouth agape. Beside him, Aunt Fumie stared, shocked into silence.

Hanae Oda looked worse than Shinya had imagined she would: her hair was a wild tangle, there were runs in her stockings, her makeup was smeared. Black streaks marked where tears made her mascara run; there was a smear of coral-pink lipstick on her sleeve.

What made Shinya shrink back, fully aware of Kaoru’s arms coming back around to encircle him again, was the look in her eyes: desperation and anger and a strange, alien righteousness. As if she thought she was doing the right thing, running into the station like a madwoman and screeching like a banshee.

Ogata, somehow too cowed to bother hiding behind Honma and her narrowed eyes, breathed, “ _That’s_ Oda’s mom?”

With a jangle of the bracelets at her wrists, Shinya’s mom finally pushed herself away from Mr. Iwai. She had the nerve to glare at him as she dusted herself off, and a station attendant watched the proceedings with wary interest.

“Yes, I am Shinya’s mother,” she snapped, and Ogata recoiled like he’d been struck, but still didn’t try to find a place to hide.

“Hanae,” Uncle Jiro said, a bit more firmly this time.

She ignored him. She glared at everyone, even the strangers walking by looking on with curiosity. “Shinya is _my_ son. He’ll be coming home with me; he’s been very ill and very resistant to staying in bed. He needs rest, not to be paraded around Tokyo by a gang of—of _kidnappers_.”

“Are we kidnappers?” Okuma stage-whispered into Sakurazawa’s ear.

“How should I know?” was the response.

The uptight investigator, today wearing a light-pink blouse under a white jacket, stepped forward. “You mean to say this is a kidnapping, Ms. Oda?”

“That’s exactly what this is!” Shinya’s mom stomped; the clack of her heel on the tile hurt Shinya’s ears. She pointed one stubby, chewed-up nail at Kaoru and Shinya, still halfway in their hug. Kaoru was gripping one of his hands so tightly it made his knuckles ache. “Look! Does it _look_ as if my son can get away? He’s sick! He’s ill! I need to take him home so he can rest!”

“And how long, exactly, has he been sick for, Ms. Oda?”

Shinya’s mom paused just long enough to do the math: too long. “Months,” she said, crossing her arms. “As I said, he’s very resistant to staying in bed, resting. He’d rather be out, wasting time, making himself sicker. No doubt that—that _delinquent_ put ideas in his head. But _I_ know he’s sick. He’s _my_ son. Of course I’d know.”

 _Of course you would_ , Shinya thought.

The uptight woman turned to him. “Is that so? Are you ill, Oda?”

“I just said—”

“I’m asking him, not you,” the woman said. She met Shinya’s eyes.

He shook his head. Words escaped him; they ran faster than he ever could.

“I think you need to say so, Shinya,” Kaoru whispered in his ear, just as the woman flashed her tape recorder, hidden behind her clasped hands.

“Why wouldn’t you ask me?” his mom was saying, oblivious to the tape recorder and growing more annoyed the longer this took. “I’m his mother! I know when he’s sick, even if he doesn’t—”

“No,” Shinya said. “I’m not sick.”

“I see,” said the woman, as his mom attempted another grab at him. This time Sakurazawa, still with Okuma in tow, stepped up to help block her. “And how long have you been… not sick?”

“Uh,” Shinya said, trying very hard not to focus on his mom’s hair flying as she threw herself at Mr. Iwai and Sakurazawa, or on the station attendant frowning openly and fingering his radio. “Months?” he wound up guessing. “I caught a cold last year, but that was way back in February.”

“February of last year? Are you sure?”

He nodded, remembered the tape recorder, said, “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“I see,” the woman said again. “And you aren’t sick, right at this very moment?”

“I told you he is!” his mom shrieked.

“No, I’m not,” Shinya said. “I haven’t been sick for months, since I caught that cold last year.”

“So you mean to say that your mother is lying about you being sick?”

“Yes.” He risked a glance at her—glaring, lips bloodless without her lipstick, cheeks red with anger—and looked away. “I—I told you why, before.”

His mom shrieked a question. The uptight woman nodded, and said, “Yes, you did.”

“Jesus, lady!” Okuma finally shouted, plugging his ears. “Are trying to give me tinnitus? I’m fifteen!”

“You’re a _delinquent_!” his mom snarled, grasping for Okuma’s arm. Sakurazawa flung him away; he collided with Shinya and Kaoru, blinking.

“Holy shit, Oda,” he muttered. “I thought she was nuts before. This is crazy. She almost scratched me.”

“Almost?” Shinya muttered back.

“Yeah, almost,” Okuma said, and despite regaining his balance, stayed where he was, a second wall. Ogata and Honma hurried over, Ogata trembling in the face of naked anger, Honma trembling with it.

(“Should _we_ do something?” Futaba asked Sojiro and Wakaba.

Sojiro eyed the mess of kids and the burly adult, the investigators and the relatives staying out of the way but ready to jump in if they had to. “I think they have it covered, Futaba.”

Wakaba patted her on the head, wondering what it would be like to lose her daughter for good.)

“Get away from my son!” Shinya’s mom screeched once more, prompting their little group to huddle in even closer.

The uptight woman turned to her. Her partner stopped her with a hand on her shoulder, and said, “Unfortunately, you have lost the right to raise young Oda here. Even if he did return with you, it would be our job to take him back.”

“Take him back?” his mom sputtered. “He’s—he’s my son! _I’m_ the one who has to raise him! Not—not anyone else! You can’t take him from me!”

“But we can, and we have,” he said. “Young Oda is a ward of the state, now. After your failure to not only comply with our investigation, your failure to respond to our letters, and your failure to show yourself in court—”

“Court?” she asked, sounding as if she didn’t know and didn’t understand. Shinya could imagine the mail piled up on the table: bills she needed to pay familiar enough to be tacked to the fridge, everything else sitting unopened, left to gather dust and slide to the floor. “No judge would take my son from me—”

“But one has. Jiro Oda has been given guardianship of young Oda, here. We’ll be making regular visits to ensure he’s well-cared for.”

Uncle Jiro gaped at them. “But I’d never—”

“I took care of him!” his mom interrupted again, then corrected herself. “I take care of him! Every day, he’s sick! Every day, he fights me! But I take care of him, because he’s my _son_!”

They were gathering a crowd, now. The station attendant tried in vain to disperse it, but people still stood by, in no hurry to catch their trains, phones held aloft to record it all. Several people whispered, their hisses too much like hers.

“So he’s sick because he fights you?” the uptight woman asked, and the crowd snickered.

“Isn’t that just puberty?” someone asked.

“Kid doesn’t look like he could take my grandma, much less her,” someone else commented.

“With a mother like that, I don’t blame him.”

Another round of snickering followed. Aunt Fumie looked mortified to be there; Uncle Jiro, finally irritated at being ignored for so long, blurted out, “Hanae! Quit makin’ a fool of yerself!”

 _Oh, no,_ Shinya thought. _I’m going to wind up with an accent._

“Goin’ on and on without so much as a hello, Hanae?” he asked, going as red in the face as she was. “And ignorin’ what’s bein’ said right in front of ya? I knew you was a stubborn gal, but turnin’ yer ear an’ pretendin’ everythin’s still hunky-dory? Ya can’t be that daft!”

“Daft,” Okuma whispered to Shinya, who only nodded. Daft was one way to put it.

“I don’t want to hear it!” Shinya’s mom shouted, with another stomp of her heel. “He’s _my_ son, and I’ll take care of him! I always have! We were fine without you barging in, making a joke of things like always—that’s what this is, isn’t it? Just another joke!” She looked from Aunt Fumie to the investigators to Kaoru and Okuma, hovering by Shinya’s side. A smirk formed; she sounded proud of herself as she said, “I bet he’s paying you to put on this farce. How much? If I offer you double, you can go, and my son and I will be on our way.”

She raked fingers through her hair, suddenly put together. The investigators shared a glance; the older man checked his watch.

Kaoru said, “Your train’s coming, Shinya. You should get going.”

“Already?” he asked, risking a glance at the station clock—nearly four, nearly time to leave and never return.

A year wouldn’t be so long—but Shinya had sinking feeling that it was going to be much longer than a single year, not after this showing. There was no way his mom was ever going to get herself together enough to properly take care of her son, not in the eyes of the state.

“Hanae,” Uncle Jiro tried again, tired after his tirade. “I wish we coulda met again under better circumstances. I wish the first hint I had of a nephew wasn’t a phone call askin’ me fer help. But wishin’ ain’t gonna change anything. I may as well be wishin’ ya aren’t the way ya are, ‘cause mebbe then we wouldn’ta had to do this. But ya are the way ya are, and there ain’t nothin’ any of us can do ta change that.”

He looked from Shinya to his mom, as if trying to find something else to say and failing. Shinya’s mom was still expectant to find that this was all a joke, but desperation was quick to return to her eyes; Shinya ducked under her gaze, gave both Kaoru and Okuma another set of quick hugs—Okuma squawked at the suddenness of it, and Shinya glowered at him in return—before hurrying to join Aunt Fumie, already halfway to the boarding line with his suitcase in tow.

His mom screamed behind him, ramming into Mr. Iwai and Sakurazawa. Whatever she was saying was lost as the crowd tittered and murmured—but he could hear her shrieks, high and wailing, the farther away he got. He could hear them even as he boarded the train, tucking a hand in his pocket for his ticket: right pocket, with his phone and weird lump that hadn’t been there before.

He took a seat and pulled it out. A golden gecko pin, its tail curled between its legs, almost close enough to matching Kaoru’s birthmark and Mr. Iwai’s tattoo. There was a note stabbed straight through the middle, and Shinya worked the pin off and onto his collar before daring to open it.

 **No matter what, you’re an Iwai** , it read in a messy scrawl. Mr. Iwai’s handwriting. Shinya would recognize it anywhere, even if it was smudged with weeks of nervous sweat.

“You dumbass,” Shinya muttered to himself. “You can tell me you think you love me, but you can’t tell me this?”

He prodded the pin with a finger. It was almost like a ring—it was _better_ than a ring, he decided. Rings didn’t mean a thing.

But the pin—it was Mr. Iwai’s words from yesterday all over again: _You’re practically family._

And now nothing could change that.

His mom was still screaming as Uncle Jiro clambered on, shaking his head.

He took his hat off, ran a hand through his thinning hair, and then sagged in his seat.

“What’ll happen to her?” Shinya asked, looking out the window to the crowd around the platform, cell phones held high, and the stiff backs of his friends.

And his family, he thought, as the gecko pin glinted in his reflection. Mr. Iwai. Kaoru.

Kaoru, who’d been interrupted twice and never got to finish what he’d begun to ask.

_When you come back, if you still love me—_

Then what? If Shinya still loved him—as if Shinya could ever not, as much as he didn’t want what they had to change—then, what?

He stared out the window, wishing for Kaoru to turn his way, glimpsing only the surge of the crowd as Shinya’s mom threw herself at the makeshift barrier once more. Station attendants hurried over, urging the crowd to disperse.

Shinya stayed glued to the window, waiting, hoping, as the train pulled away. Kaoru didn’t turn, standing tall against the slurs Shinya’s mom was slinging at them all. Even Ogata, who cried at the drop of a hat, had yet to crumple.

Aunt Fumie patted his knee. “You’ve got good friends, Shinya.”

Shinya relaxed as they entered a tunnel, sagging against the plush seat, wishing for just one more second.

But it was too late: the train roared over its tracks, taking him away from the best and worst people he’d ever known.

_When you come back—_

Shinya shut his eyes, trying to imagine what he’d be like in a year—in two years—in three—and whether he’d ever fall out of this love he’d found himself neck-deep in only a few months ago. Surely it was impossible.

Just as impossible as falling in love.

He opened his eyes to gray slate, his reflection, the gecko pin glinting in the light, and decided it didn’t matter—whether he kept loving Kaoru, whether he stopped, whether the distance proved to be too much for their friendship—because, no matter what, they were family.

That was more solid than any love he’d ever felt.

“Yeah, I do, huh,” he said, and mindlessly took her offered water bottle.

* * *

Kaoru waited until Ms. Oda was hauled away by police to finally turn around.

Shinya’s train was long gone, and the careful drone of train announcements and the chatter of people washed over him.

He didn’t get to say it.

He leveled a glare at the station entrance, where one of Ms. Oda’s heels had finally broken as she struggled to free herself from the officer’s grip; a station attendant bent to collect it before being blocked from sight by a group of students in matching uniforms. A sports team, from their flushed faces, weary gait, and the extra bags slung over their shoulders.

“Oh, geez,” Ogata muttered beside him, and slumped to his knees.

Okuma rubbed his jaw, where a thrown earring had smacked him hard enough to leave a welt. “Geez is right. She—what? She didn’t read her court papers? She thought it was a _joke_? Oda hadn’t been home in over a month and she thought she could waltz in and he’d just give up?”

“She was probably banking on him being more afraid of her than of the system,” said Mr. Sakura, from a spot on the benches. Alibaba sat huddled between him and her mother, slouched into her hoodie.

“Disgusting,” Honma said, and Kaoru agreed.

Dad and Sakurazawa were over at the attendant’s station, getting their cuts and scrapes cleaned and bandaged. Dad was simultaneously bemused by the attendant’s prodding with a swab and furious at what had led to a rather nasty scratch on his arm: Ms. Oda swiping at him as Shinya boarded his train, then clamping down. There was a neat set of puncture wounds where she’d grabbed him, each of them bleeding. His sleeve of tattoos drew eyes and repelled them in equal measure.

“Well, I suppose we’ll be going,” Honma said, brushing off her skirt and tugging Ogata to his feet. “Any later and I’ll miss dinner. It was nice meeting another friend of Oda’s, even under the circumstances.”

“Yeah,” Ogata agreed, still breathless. “Nice to—to meet you.”

“Yeah,” Kaoru said, sure this was the only time he’d ever see this particular group of friends together again in his lifetime. “Thanks for being here for him.”

Honma nodded, then made her way over to the exit, stopping just long enough to collect her and Ogata’s bags. Ogata followed along in her wake like a lost puppy, confused and cowed and exhausted.

Kaoru understood: after all the adrenaline wore off, it was hard enough to keep standing.

“Guess I’d better go, too,” Okuma said, flicking his bangs out of his eyes. “Got a train ride to plan. Maybe I’ll get a job to pay for it. Oda’d like to hear that, don’t you think?”

“Doing what?”

He struck a pose. “I’d totally rock a 777 uniform, wouldn’t I?”

That pink and green monstrosity? Shinya would die laughing. “Yeah, you would,” Kaoru said, and waved goodbye as he went to collect Sakurazawa.

Sure that if he stayed standing for one more second he’d collapse on the spot, Kaoru made his way over to the bench where Alibaba and her little family sat, patiently waiting out the drama. Her mother was glued to her phone and trying to keep Alibaba from catching a glimpse of what was on the screen. “It’s for work, Futaba,” was the explanation. “It’s top secret.”

“But _Mom_ ,” Alibaba whined.

“Listen to your mother,” Mr. Sakura said, and Alibaba pouted.

Kaoru slumped to the floor beside them and asked, “What did you mean, she was banking on him being more afraid of her?”

“Just what I said,” Mr. Sakura said. “People like that, they get what they want through fear. He was afraid she’d hurt you for rescuing him from that apartment, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah.” It hurt to hear it, even now. Shinya had been more scared for Kaoru than he had for his own safety. He’d been terrified that some sort of repercussion would rear its ugly head—but it never had. Ms. Oda was all bluster. The only person she could ever hurt was Shinya.

“So if she’d found him and said, ‘Come back home with me, or I’ll hurt the ones who helped you, no matter who they are,’ what do you think he would have done?”

“Gone with her.” Like he had the day after Kaoru’s kidnapping, blindly stepping into the apartment, blindly letting her dig her nails into his shoulder until he winced from the pain, blindly wishing that this time she’d listen and understand—

That was the start of it all, Kaoru thought. That moment when Shinya had ducked out from under her thumb and run away, his hand clamped around Kaoru’s wrist, too terrified of her rage to look back but too angry to sit there and face her anymore.

Mr. Sakura nodded. “Kids like that don’t learn that even their parents have limitations. She would have ruled over him with an iron fist for the rest of his life, no doubt about that, and he would have thought he needed to stay, to protect others from her. But that’s not his job. It never was and it never will be.” Mr. Sakura fixed him with a look. “And you made sure he knew that. Maybe you didn’t say it outright, but you didn’t have to—all he’d have to do is look at the relationship you have with your father and compare it to his own. That’s why she was trying to isolate him: so he’d never know, never understand, and never leave.”

“Geez, Sojiro, talk much?” Alibaba said, bored with the game of keep-away—or determining the best way to hack into her mom’s phone and find out, it was hard to tell. She kicked her feet under the bench. “But you _are_ right. That’s how Madarame got to Inari, and Kamoshida to the NPC. They make you think you’re alone, that nobody will understand, that no one will care. They make you think you have it good even as they’re beating you into the ground, or that you don’t have any other options.”

Her mother, still scrolling through her phone, brought her in for a one-sided hug. Alibaba clung to her arm, laying her head on her shoulder, closing her eyes before she made contact.

All of what she said sounded exactly like Shinya’s mother—but Kaoru wondered how much of it was calculated and how much was sheer coincidence, then wondered if it mattered. No matter what her intentions had been, Shinya was still gone, and he had still found the family she tried to throw away, and he had still made the friends she tried to scare off. Shinya was stronger than her.

Kaoru hoped that his aunt and uncle would be good for him. He hoped they’d be everything Shinya’s mother wasn’t. He hoped they tried to understand him.

… He wondered if Shinya found the note Kaoru had planted in his pocket in the mess. He wondered if Shinya was wearing the pin. He wondered what that looked like, Shinya belonging somewhere at last.

“He’s safe now,” Kaoru told himself, trying to believe it. Jiro and Fumie Oda didn’t seem like bad people, and the state wouldn’t let them take Shinya if they hadn’t done the proper research first. Part of Kaoru wished he’d gone with them, just for a day or two, just to get the lay of the land, to see what Shinya was going to be dealing with for the next year, to see how they interacted with him after a long enough time.

But if he went, he’d never want to leave. So he’d stayed, refusing to look at the train as it pulled out of the station, like a coward.

“Yeah, he is,” Alibaba said, and if she said it, Kaoru supposed he had to believe it. She had her ways of knowing anything she wanted to; this would be trivial by comparison.

And her mention of Prim earlier had set his blood on fire; he was still working through Prim’s ending, a happy one, one where no one stayed dead and the girl he and Shinya had controlled was living, happily, with everyone she loved. It was tough going; he’d never known Prim before Shinya’s control. He doubted Shinya did, either.

But Alibaba might.

Kaoru asked, “Did you mean that, about the painting of Prim?”

“Yeah, of course,” she said, twirling the drawstring of her hoodie around a finger.

“You’ve seen her happy?”

“Not personally, but Inari has. He was convinced he could”—her voice dropped, mimicking a deep baritone that made Mr. Sakura snort—“‘capture her essence’ if we gave him some time. He… really wants to do this, too. The portrait.”

She stopped. Kaoru waited for her to continue. Instead she asked, “Why? Didn’t you ever see her happy?”

“How much of it was her own happiness?” he asked in return. “When she was helping that church woman—did that make her happy? Did pushing so hard for her plans make her happy? I feel like I didn’t know a thing about her.”

That was why he couldn’t finish her story: the idea that she was happy somewhere, not fighting for her life, was too odd to comprehend. It didn’t fit with the slightly trigger-happy Prim Shinya had control of, the one who’d sooner start a fight than opt to talk it out.

“But you want to,” Alibaba guessed, and he nodded. She hummed, still kicking her feet, and across the station Sakurazawa and Dad were finally released from the attendant’s station. Dad stared at the bandages on his arm; Sakurazawa slung an arm over Okuma’s shoulders and hauled him out of the station.

Dad was halfway across the station when she added, “You know, so do I. I’ll arrange it.”

She laughed, and her mother said, “This won’t involve any hacking, will it.”

“Don’t need to,” Alibaba said, then cackled some more. “I’ve got a source. All we need to do is ply him with food. Lots of it. And paint! Lots of that, too.”

Dad stopped in front of their bench, brows raised.

“For the portrait for Shinya,” Kaoru offered, getting to his feet. “You’ve got my number, so just let me know when.”

Alibaba had already tugged her phone out and was typing, rapid-fire, and only offered him a wave to acknowledge that she’d heard. Kaoru met it—Mr. Sakura nodded, and Alibaba’s mother looked up from her screen long enough to realize that the group was nearly dispersed, blinking in confusion—and headed for the station exit, Dad at his side.

“Somethin’ good come outta that whole mess?” Dad asked.

He still didn’t know about the story. About Prim, and Shinya, and the world on the other side of a screen—it was too unbelievable, even with evidence staring him right in the face. Even Kaoru had a hard enough time believing it was real.

But it was, just like Shinya’s was, and that made it a story worth telling.

“Yeah,” Kaoru said. “I think so.”

**Author's Note:**

> Look I know I promised bexm in December (it's still happening, don't worry) but as I was working a bit on the epilogue, I realized Shinya's story wasn't done. Not completely, and definitely not to my liking.
> 
> So... I had to tell it. Crossing my fingers that it's halfway decent.


End file.
